And it obviously does, as evidenced by the increasingly desperate and pathetic efforts by Trump and his team to shill for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist.

The president has been filling his Twitter feed with laments that Sanders is being mistreated and faux concerns that the race is being rigged against him. No doubt Russian bots are adding to the chorus as well.

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But then, what would you expect? Trump is apparently so terrified of former vice president Joe Biden that he felt compelled to commit an abuse of power that led to his impeachment.

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The campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination has taken more than its share of seemingly impossible turns, and there may well be more to come. The velocity with which expectations have formed and then exploded has been unlike anything in memory.

But at least for now, the party has returned to its original theory of the case, which is that the man who served as No. 2 during Barack Obama’s presidency is the Democrats’ safest bet to bring an end to Trump’s.

Exit polls indicated that, with only a handful of exceptions, Democratic voters in the 14 states that cast their ballots Tuesday would prefer a president who would return to Obama’s policies over one who would chart a more liberal direction.

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Biden dominated among conservative and moderate primary voters, which was not exactly a surprise. But he also did well among the large share who called themselves somewhat liberal, especially those who live in Southern states.

In the early going of this primary season, Biden’s shaky performance raised understandable doubts about his capability as a candidate to carry the party across the finish line. In debates and on the stump, he often seemed to be missing a step.

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Biden finished miserably in Iowa and New Hampshire, and ran a distant second to Sanders in Nevada. It began to appear that in a large field in which the moderate vote would be split among a handful of credible candidates, the Vermont senator would win pluralities in enough states to forge ahead in the race for convention delegates.

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That prospect horrified many who believed that picking Sanders would guarantee a second term for Trump, possibly by a landslide. So on Tuesday, voters across the Democratic coalition — taking their lead from the African Americans in South Carolina who lifted him to a resounding victory three days before — decided to hoist Biden on their own shoulders.

It helped that much of the party establishment, including several of Biden’s former rivals who had left the race, scrambled aboard his effort. This was a show of collective purpose that Republicans had been unable to muster in 2016, when they were desperate to stop Trump’s hostile takeover of their party.

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On Wednesday, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose campaign of financial shock-and-awe failed to do either on Tuesday, gave up his own bid and threw his backing (and presumably, tens of millions of dollars to come) to Biden.

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The once-robust candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was humiliated when she placed third in a state that has elected her twice, is also near its end. There is no path forward for her. The only question now is whether Warren will endorse Sanders or Biden, or decide that she will remain more relevant if she doesn’t.

Sanders has what he needs — intensely loyal supporters and a seemingly bottomless supply of contributions — to continue in the race right up to the party convention this summer in Milwaukee. But the results so far do not back up his claim that he can bring an army of new voters with him and beyond to November.

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On Tuesday, the states that showed the biggest primary turnout gains over 2016 — among them, Virginia, North Carolina and Texas — were all won by Biden. (California, where Sanders is ahead, was still counting ballots as I wrote this.)

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Democrats should not fear what lies ahead, even if it is a long and robust battle between the only two people who still have a shot. At the end of it, the country will have a far clearer idea of what the party stands for — and so will the Democrats themselves.