For a number of weeks, Mr. Sanders surged. In Iowa, he completed in a digital tie for first with Pete Buttigieg, the previous mayor of South Bend, Ind., who, at 38, was lower than half his age. He then narrowly beat Mr. Buttigieg in New Hampshire, earlier than dominating the sphere lower than two weeks later within the Nevada caucuses.
All of the sudden there was discuss that Mr. Sanders would run away with the nomination. However his loss in South Carolina to Mr. Biden, who had emerged because the main average within the race, introduced his momentum to an abrupt halt, elevating important questions on his weaknesses with black voters and an overriding failure to develop his base.
Three days later, as centrist Democrats rushed to assist Mr. Biden, Mr. Sanders misplaced the entire Southern states voting on Tremendous Tuesday in addition to states like Massachusetts and Minnesota that he had anticipated to win.
Mr. Sanders rapidly canceled a deliberate rally in Mississippi and deployed assets to Michigan, a tacit acknowledgment that the Midwestern state had turn into one thing of a must-win for his candidacy to outlive.
However it was to not be. The momentum had turned solidly to Mr. Biden, who received Michigan simply then every week later captured three large delegate prizes — Florida, Illinois and Arizona.
By then, the coronavirus was disrupting the remainder of the political calendar, forcing states to postpone their primaries till June. Mr. Sanders has spent a lot of the period in-between at his dwelling in Burlington with out his high advisers, assessing the way forward for his marketing campaign. Some near him had speculated he may keep within the race to proceed to amass delegates as leverage in opposition to Mr. Biden.
However within the days main as much as his withdrawal from the race, aides had come to imagine that it was time to finish the marketing campaign. A few of Mr. Sanders’s closest advisers started mapping out the monetary and political issues for him and what situations would give him the utmost quantity of leverage for his coverage proposals, and a few concluded that it might be extra useful for him to droop his marketing campaign.