On Super Tuesday, voters in 14 states cast ballots in the Democratic Primary – and Joe Biden won 10 of them. Pulling off upsets in states like Minnesota and Massachusetts, Biden dominated the night after his fellow moderates pulled out of the race and endorsed him. Sanders’s supporters did not take this well.

Of all the hyperbolic claims from the Bernie Bros, perhaps the most incorrect and irresponsible was that the dropping out and endorsing tactic was “election rigging” by “The Establishment.” I will not give credence to this insidious claim by working to refute it. However, even Sanders himself claimed, on live TV, that Klobuchar and Buttigieg were forced out of the race by “The Establishment”. Taking the most charitable interpretation of these claims, one might say that the argument the Sanders camp is making is that “The Establishment” of the Democratic Party is out of touch with the true base of the party and is working to foil its preferred candidate, Sanders. This argument is deeply problematic.

Who Exactly Is The Establishment?

To start, the concept of an Establishment is so vague and so malleable as to make it almost useless for analysis. Who is the Establishment? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and former President Barack Obama certainly are, but who else? Maybe you define it by who has been in party politics for a while, but this seems to include people like Elizabeth Warren and exclude Pete Buttigieg. Maybe you define it by having leadership roles in the party, but this is much too narrow for how most on the Left prefer to use the term. Do local party politicians count? What about party veterans who lean heavily left? No clear definition seems possible, at least not one which maps neatly onto how the term is used in political discussions. Instead, it seems to mostly be an ominous pejorative to throw at a vague group of people who don’t like Bernie Sanders, or who aren’t left-wing enough.

The Base Chose Biden

However, most fundamentally, this argument is flawed because if anyone is out of touch with the Democratic base, it’s Bernie Sanders. On Tuesday over ⅔ of black voters voted against Sanders. More voters (42%) for whom healthcare is their number one priority voted for Biden than for Sanders. A majority of white voters voted against Sanders. And most women voted against Sanders. If that’s not the Democratic base, then what is?

The fact of the matter is Bernie Sanders enjoys the support of a significant minority of Democratic voters, and that’s it. The base of the party, the one which in the 2018 midterms elected moderate Democrats to the house in droves, has rejected Bernie’s message. He and his supporters need to recognize that and stop pretending otherwise.

And They Had Good Reasons For Doing So

Furthermore, the Sanders camp needs to realize that part of the reason they got clobbered on Tuesday is that the Democratic base has real, legitimate concerns about Sanders. In a popular tweet thread, senior writer for TheRoot.com Micheal Harriot explained why so many black southern voters will never vote for Bernie. First, he’s not a Democrat, and they are. But, more importantly, for many southern African Americans, “the Establishment” are their church leaders and educators and activists. For a group of Americans whose lives very much depend on politics, “the Establishment” which Bernie hates and attacks so much has always been there for them in a way Bernie has never even tried to be.

Bernie Sanders is losing the primary because he is less popular than Joe Biden. It’s as simple as that. Delusions and conspiracies can’t change the fundamental fact that he is out of touch with the Democratic base.

