Bernie Sanders Defeats Joe Biden In Northern Mariana Islands Caucus, 132 People Voted In Total
If Bernie Sanders launches a comeback to overtake Joe Biden and win the Democratic nomination, it will apparently start in the Northern Mariana Islands.
The American commonwealth held caucuses on Saturday to award a total of six delegates toward the party’s nomination. Sanders defeated Biden by 27 points, winning the contest by a margin of 63 percent to 36 percent — with a total of just 132 people voting. As ABC News reported, the results were made official after polls closed at 6 p.m. local time in the American commonwealth, which is located in the northwestern Pacific Ocean.
As the report noted, the results are a reversal from Sanders’s last performance in the sparsely populated island chain. In the 2016 Democratic primary, he was defeated by Hillary Clinton by a margin of 54 percent to 34.4 percent. The only other candidate remaining in this year’s race, Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, did not receive any votes.
The preliminary results of Saturday’s contest showed that Sanders would pick up four delegates while Biden would receive two, a small step toward what is seen as a nearly impossible gap for Sanders to overcome. The Vermont senator was seen as the race’s frontrunner after wins in the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucus, but Biden surged back into the race with a stronger-than-expected performance in the South Carolina primary and followed it with a string of major victories and upsets on Super Tuesday.
Biden followed that with even more wins in races last Tuesday, including defeating Sanders in Michigan and Missouri, states where Sanders had campaigned and expressed confidence he would win.
Political analysts say that the major gap in delegates is now almost impossible for Sanders to make up. The poll aggregator and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight projected that Biden had greater than a 99 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates in the contest, winning the nomination at this summer’s Democratic National Convention outright and avoiding going to a second ballot, where superdelegates would then be in play.
Sanders has vowed to stay in the race despite some calls for him to drop out, and he is planning to debate Biden on Sunday in Arizona. But the landscape does not appear to get any easier for Sanders, with Biden projected to score big wins in contests held on March 17. FiveThirtyEight projects Biden to win by double-digits in all four races that day — Ohio, Arizona, Florida, and Illinois. Wins by these margins would leave Sanders with virtually no room left to recover.
