Biden won the Hawaii Democratic primary today, 63% to 37% for Bernie, with Bernie not even running. Biden picked up 16 delegates and Bernie got 8, making Biden 1566 delegates so far.
The paper that reported this didn’t bother to mention how many delegates Bernie has: it’s 1007 as of today. There are about 150 delegates committed to other candidates, mostly Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg.
Nineteen more states still have to hold their Democratic primaries. This includes big states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Indiana, all with a lot of delegates. Not that Bernie is likely to pick up the high percent of votes necessary to make him the candidate. He’s not campaigning and not running. But he’s going to continue to gather delegates and will come to the convention with between a third and 40% of the delegates. One of the concessions he wrung out of the Democratic Party early in his campaign was that he would be able to seat his delegates, that and that “superdelegates,” the party hacks, would not get to vote in the first round of balloting. See previous post about his joint task forces with Biden.
Seven states have called off their Republican primaries entirely, which is being challenged by Trump Republican opponents as un-democratic.
Trump has urged states to re-open, but Rev.Barber of The Poor People’s Campaign is urging people to stay home, don’t believe the lies — workers who are being called back to work are being sent to their deaths. Rates of COVID-19 deaths among Black people are three times as high as among whites.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-americans-death-rate-covid-19-coronavirus
As of today, the death toll in the US is 96,000, the most of any country in the world, with the UK coming in second at 36,000. Our death rate is relatively low, however — one third of Spain’s. The NYTime figured that we lost about 36,000 dead due to the late start of the shutdown.
Cook County (that is, Chicago) with 69000 confirmed cases has more than any other county in the country. However, New York City is made up of more than one county, so New York is still ahead.
Propublica has a graphic of how states are doing as they re-open: https://projects.propublica.org/reopening-america/
California is reopening. Joe and I went out on our bikes to see what things look like:
How's that Working Out For You? 