Sanders, Biden Up Attacks As Head-To-Head Contests Loom

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are the two major candidates left in the United States Democratic presidential primary election.

Each candidate is spending their first weekend as their party’s last top White House contenders working hard to best one another at the same time  demonstrating  that he is the right choice before six more states – Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington – vote on Tuesday

Biden saw a surge of donor support after South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and his campaign announced that it was spending $12m on a six-state advertisements buy in places voting this Tuesday and the following week. It was his largest single advertising effort of the 2020 campaign.

He is using two television and digital advertisements, one promoting his relationship with former President Barack Obama, the other a new effort to counter a Sanders attack on Biden’s past record on Social Security. It is a criticism Sanders has used for months, though he has not mentioned it as frequently while campaigning in Michigan.

“Biden will increase Social Security benefits and protect it for generations to come,” a narrator intones in one of the ads, before turning the matter back on Sanders. “Negative ads will only help Donald Trump. It’s time we bring our party together.”

At 78, Sanders is actually a year older than Biden. But the avowed democratic socialist who has served in Congress since 1991, argues that he has bucked the establishment of both parties with decades of unpopular stands that now give him the credibility to lead a political revolution “from the bottom up”.

Sanders says it is part of a larger movement that can draw younger voters, minorities and working-class people to the polls even though they tend to vote in lower concentrations than many other Americans.

Strong support among Hispanics lifted Sanders to victories in Nevada and California, but Biden trounced him in South Carolina and throughout much of the Deep South that voted during last week’s Super Tuesday. Biden especially ran up the score with the African Americans.

Sanders is looking for a strong finish in Washington. But he canceled a trip to Mississippi to focus on Michigan, the largest prize on Tuesday.