Bye Bye Bernie: Super Tuesday May Leave Sanders Super Sad

It’s been one heck of a fight, and he’s put a lot into campaigning and fundraising, and is highly popular with the Generation Y, despite the fact that he’s decades older. He has more life experience than any presidential nominee due to the years he’s lived. He’s less harsh than many, making him a favorite of those who seek a kinder, softer nation: the antithesis of Donald Trump and his hard views on immigration. Bernie has never said anything to offend women, or a Muslim, or a native of Mexico. His father’s family perished in the Holocaust due to their Jewish faith. His ethnicity is Jewish, but he doesn’t practice Judaism; his favorite practice seems to be one of tolerance.

He has far less angry faces or harsh words than Hillary Clinton. He has said he will make college tuition negligible, healthcare available to everyone regardless of ability to pay, and give women the equal rights they deserve. With all the Bernie love, he’s a shoo-in for the Democratic presidential nomination, right? Nobody’s going to vote for Hillary Clinton with this crazy email investigation and her less-than-engaging personality, right?

Wrong.

The truth is that while he may win the popular vote, it’s very unlikely he will win the nomination. And the reason is simple: small states and their people love him, but Hillary does far better in the larger states with more delegates. Sanders is by no means a lost cause, particularly not in the minds of his “Bernie or Bust” followers. But the hard facts are hard numbers, and these aren’t going to add well for Sanders.

The Vermont Senator and his team are focusing on five battleground states on Super Tuesday, the day next week when 11 states will hold primaries or caucuses all at once. It’s a possibility that Sanders may even win more states than Clinton, but it’s highly improbable to be enough. The states she is predicted to take (some by a landslide) have far more delegates, including Florida. It’s not just that she’s ahead by more states– she’s also leading larger margins in those places, which would potentially cause her to take massive amounts of delegates under the Democratic Party’s proportional allocation system, according to MSNBC. This means it’s unlikely she would take all of the delegates from each of those states, but is expected to take the vast majority.

What kind of numbers are we talking about? Sanders’ supporters won’t like these numerical predictions, but they are being predicted by many anyway. Sanders’ six states he’s likely to win on Tuesday have a combined number of 288 delegates. Hillary Clinton has a predicted win of nearly double that: 571 delegates. That’s the type of burn that Sanders doesn’t want people to feel.

The state that really holds the cards on Super Tuesday is Texas; it has 222 delegates for the taking. It may be anybody’s race at this point, but numerous polls show Clinton with a strong lead over Sanders as of today; about 30 percent more of the vote. Something dramatic would probably need to happen to turn that around. David Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report, has been analyzing the Democratic Delegate situation, and says it’s going to be a near impossibility to turn it around at this point for Sanders.

“If Hillary Clinton performs as well as her current trends among African-Americans, Latinos and whites would indicate, then she will be on track to win between 75-100 more delegates on Super Tuesday.”

Texas and Virginia are both places that are rich in all of those demographics, and both places Hillary is expected to take by a landslide. The South is not a Sanders-friendly arena, so the best his camp can hope for is that they will perform incredibly well later in March in states like Michigan and Ohio. Even so, Super Tuesday is likely to leave many Sanders supporters super sad.

[image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]