This Tuesday, February 10, in the late afternoon, New Hampshire votes and Joe Biden flees. At the end of the morning, he decided to cancel the planned election night in the city of Nashua, anticipating a new rout. A few days earlier, he admitted to having "Got a slap" in Iowa, where he came fourth. During the debate in the Granite State on February 7, he publicly anticipated another defeat but, when the first estimates appear, it is even more cruel than feared.
With only 8% of the vote, he is condemned to an unthinkable fifth place for a former vice-president. No candidate has ever survived such cruel setbacks in the first two states to vote in a Democratic presidential nomination contest. Joe Biden flies to South Carolina, which is scheduled to vote on February 29. "It's not over, it's just started", he swears to Columbia.
For weeks, alarming signals have been accumulating for the one who entered the campaign in April 2019 with the rank of favorite. He fights, he assures, for "The soul" of America, threatened by Donald Trump, but he does not display the energy of his rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who promise "Political revolution" or from "Major structural changes". By reducing the billionaire’s election to a combination of circumstances, Joe Biden scarcely sketches any prospect other than an unmotivating backtrack. Its rooms are sparse, and its finances in danger.
Warning shot
The day before New Hampshire's vote, in the basement of a church in the small town of Gilford, the former vice-president dwells more on the past, on his balance sheet, on his painful personal trials – death of his first wife and his first daughter in a road accident, that of his son Beau, who died of cancer – that he would not project his audience into the future. A sexagenarian who came to listen to her out of curiosity confides: "I don't want to be mean to Joe Biden, but it looks like he's out of juice. " Some of his supporters openly hesitate.
Everything seems to come together against the former vice president. The push from the left, embodied by the independent senator from Vermont and his colleague from Massachusetts, prompted in November 2019 the billionaire Michael Bloomberg to enter the race. But the latter crumbles even more the camp of candidates who defend more moderate proposals and which already counts, in addition to Joe Biden, the senator of Minnesota Amy Klobuchar, the former mayor of a small town of Indiana Pete Buttigieg, feeling of the start of the nomination contest, or the billionaire and philanthropist Tom Steyer.
