A Brief, Final Presidential Power Ranking Assessing a two-person race in the Land of Lincoln.

Next week, we’re going to get the Illinois primary we always expected: a showdown between an establishment moderate and an insurgent progressive. And it may decide which of those candidates gives the acceptance speech in Milwaukee. Super Tuesday didn’t settle anything. Biden won the most states, but Sanders won the biggest state, California. The delegate count is 670 for Biden, and 574 for Sanders.

As a microcosm of the nation — America in miniature — Illinois is the ideal battleground for this fight. We’re all the Super Tuesday states rolled into one. Like Alabama, we have a significant black population. Like Texas, a Latino population. We have a big, global city, like those in California, and we have the rural Midwest, like Minnesota. If you can win Illinois, you can win anywhere.

Here’s how we think they stack up.

1 JOE BIDEN

Faced with a choice between an establishment candidate and a left-wing challenger, Illinois almost always chooses the former. Edmund Muskie over George McGovern in 1972. Jimmy Carter over Edward Kennedy in 1980. Walter Mondale over Gary Hart in 1984. And most recently, Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016. (We did make exceptions for favorite-son senators Paul Simon and Barack Obama.) In this state that perfected the Democratic Machine, politics is a practical pursuit, not an expression of idealism.

That favors Biden. He is not exciting. He’s the FM lite rock station that everyone at work agrees on, but nobody really likes. He’s the minivan you buy because it’s a safe ride for your kids. Like the state of Illinois, he’s never gotten anyone’s blood rushing.

This isn’t California or Hawaii. After Biden won South Carolina, many of the state’s top elected officials jumped on the Biden bandwagon, including Sen. Dick Durbin, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Rep. Robin Kelly, and Rep. Mike Quigley. (Gov. J.B. Pritzker is not making an endorsement.)

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden is very popular with black voters, winning more than 60 percent of their votes in many Super Tuesday states. Two of Illinois’s majority-black congressional districts send eight delegates to the convention, while another will send seven. Biden will get most of them.

2 BERNIE SANDERS

Earlier this month, when Sanders’s Chicago headquarters opened at 606 West Roosevelt, he was still the favorite to win the nomination. The rented storefront was packed, but the composition of the crowd when I visited represented the campaign’s weaknesses: Most were young, and very few were African-American.

No candidate can match the intensity of Sanders’s support. One wall was covered in Bernie fan art: Bernie hugging a baby, Bernie dunking a basketball, a green demon in a studded bra, pointing to a Bernie tattoo on her chest. One supporter wore a sweatshirt depicting Bernie as Obi-wan Kenobi, with the legend, “Help Us Bernie Sanders, You’re Our Only Hope.” It was reminiscent of Barack Obama’s “Hope” posters.

Sanders has the support of Rep. Chuy Garcia, who he endorsed in 2015 for mayor against Rahm Emanuel. But in Illinois, the Latino vote won’t be as valuable as the black vote, since most Latino voters live in a single congressional district.

Sanders is also supported by a host of progressive alderman, including the 10th Ward’s Susan Sadlowski-Garza, who led the room in his campaign’s chant of “Not Me, Us!” The keynote speaker was Rep. Pramiya Jayapal of Washington, who compared Sanders’s grassroots movement to the organizing campaigns of Chicago’s own Saul Alinsky. Campaign staffers signed up volunteers to hand out flyers at literature drops set up to reach every Chicago area congressional district.

Sanders has transcended politics to become a cultural figure, leading a crusade. But ballots don’t register passion. If he wants a shot at Illinois, Sanders has to expand his appeal beyond the third of the electorate that would swim naked across Lake Michigan to get him into the White House. This time around, he may find out that his 2016 popularity was as much about Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity as his own message.

3 TULSI GABBARD

Gabbard finally won a couple delegates on Super Tuesday, in American Samoa. She won’t win another one in Illinois.











RIP

Ranking and anlysis as of February 21: