Got my first donuts today at TOP. Guess I’m officially in the 99%.

Oh Bernie, I wish you hadn’t given up your leverage.

This is the phase of the election where the left is tempted to engage in all sorts of short-sighted infighting over disagreements that should be up for discussion, but shouldn’t lead to any significant or real division. We need to strategize, organize & think of our long game.

— Ana Kasparian (@AnaKasparian) April 13, 2020

Joe Biden defeats Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin primary, NBC News projects

With 21 percent of the vote in, Biden has a commanding lead over Sanders of 65 percent to 29 percent, or 138,555 votes to 61,304 votes. NBC News projects that lead will translate into a net 30 delegate gain for Biden over Sanders, bringing his total to 1,273 delegates to Sanders’ 953

A federal judge gave the state an extra six days to receive and count the unprecedented surge in absentee ballots voters requested and barred the state from releasing results of the April 7 election until April 13.

Heading into Wisconsin, Biden had already amassed a nearly insurmountable lead over Sanders in delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Milwaukee in August after it was pushed back a month due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, but was trailing Biden in Marquette Law School’s final poll before the 2020 contest.

Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary the day after Wisconsin’s election, staying in long enough to get his supporters to turn out for a key state supreme court race, and the Vermont senator endorsed Biden on Monday in a surprise appearance on the former vice president’s live-streamed campaign event.

Thanks to those mailed-in-ballots, turnout may actually be on par with past elections despite the fear of contagion and a statewide stay-at-home order.

Nearly 1.3 million Wisconsin voters requested absentee ballots and 1.08 million returned according to the Wisconsin Election Commission, compared to the little over 1 million total ballots cast (both in-person and absentee) in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and the 1.11 million cast overall in 2008 Democratic primary.

Historically, just 5 percent or so of Wisconsin voters cast an absentee ballot while the vast majority voted in person, but that ratio may be close to reversed this time.

Conservatives have a majority on the seven-member high court, most of whom are elected, but liberals have been trying to make the balance more equitable before the court takes up some major voting rights cases in the most important swing state in the country ahead of the November presidential election.

Democrats supported Jill Karofsky, a judge and former domestic violence prosecutor, while Republicans backed incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly, the former president of his chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.

Also on the ballot are thousands of municipal offices, including the mayor of Milwaukee, which is part of the reason why state officials resisted postponing the election, even as every other state in the country that planned to hold an election in April rescheduled.

The Wisconsin race was marred by legal and political disputes after the state’s Democratic governor tried to call off the election at the last minute, citing public health, only to be rebuffed by the state’s Republican legislative leaders, who won judgments in their favor from the conservative majorities on both the Wisconsin and U.S. Supreme Courts.

A new controversy has emerged since the election after officials received thousands of mailed-in ballots that may not be counted because the U.S. Postal Service did not give them a dated postmark.

State law has no postmark requirement, but the U.S. Supreme Court added one by requiring ballots be postmarked by Election Day in order to be counted. Democrats on the Wisconsin Election Commission pushed to count those ballots, but Republicans said their hands were tied by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez told reporters Monday that it’s “unconscionable” that the ballots would not be counted, calling the behavior of Wisconsin Republicans “voter suppression on steroids” and accusing them of trying to “steal this election.”

While the tone is somewhat condescending, I think the writer makes some salient points.

How Joe Biden won over Bernie Sanders — and the Democratic Party

Most pivotally — and much to the frustration of Sanders — Biden cut deals with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg that convinced them to drop out and endorse his campaign on the eve of Super Tuesday. Then, in a bid to win Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement, or at least stop her from endorsing Sanders, he conceded on the argument that has defined their relationship, adopting her bankruptcy reform bill as his own. And now, in an effort to win not just Sanders’s endorsement but his actual support, he’s building a novel structure through which Sanders’s ideas and staff can shape Biden’s campaign and agenda.

One concern liberals and leftists have long had with Biden is his instinct for cutting deals means he’ll sell them out to the right to win Republican votes. Maybe so. But what Biden is proving in this campaign is he’s just as willing to cut deals with the left, and his coalitional approach to politics is an opportunity for them to influence him, as well.

As Waleed Shahid, spokesman for the leftist Justice Democrats, tweeted, “a major factor in a movement’s ability to shape a party is if the party’s leadership and nominee concretely signal that the constituency is a major part of the ‘party coalition.’ Sanders-Biden summit was a signal.”

In all of this, Biden is acting less like a candidate than a party leader, less like one side of an argument that will be settled by his victory and more like a legislator who recognizes the only way to in is to make real, serious concessions to his colleagues. He’s not asking the left to “bend the knee” and accept his victory. He’s inviting them into coalition and offering concrete concessions and avenues of influence in return for their participation.

In a fascinating interview with ⁦@NYTBen⁩, ⁦@deanbaquet⁩ reveals the Times made that controversial edit in the Tara Reade story at the behest of the Biden campaign. https://t.co/YtDHoeQTuy

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 13, 2020

A handy voting guide:

a vote for Trump = a vote for Trump
a vote for Biden = a vote for Biden
a vote for the Green Party = a vote for the Green Party
a vote for no one = a vote for no one

I hope this helps!

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) April 13, 2020

"One of the things that I've been telling my colleagues is if you live in the United States of America, you're a neighbor. Nobody wants to fix [our immigration system] because there are people that make money off of our broken immigration system" @RashidaTlaib to @detroitdsa pic.twitter.com/WeNXgRFSlz

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) April 14, 2020

It’s Really Telling When the WSJ Does a Better Job of Reporting at times than other Establishment Media

Bernie Sanders Endorses Joe Biden for President (behind a paywall)

To illustrate areas of overlap, Mr. Biden told Mr. Sanders that he supports the push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Mr. Biden said he would not only need Mr. Sanders’s backing “to win the campaign, but to govern.”

“This is further proof that even though Bernie Sanders won’t be on the ballot in November, his issues will be,” said Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, in a statement.

Mr. Sanders has said he would remain on the ballot in the states that are yet to vote in the Democratic primaries in an effort to continue to accumulate delegates and have more power in deciding the party platform during the convention in August.

Mr. Biden has made a series of overtures to Mr. Sanders and his supporters through policy proposals on health care and college tuition.

He embraced a plan designed to expand Medicare by lowering the eligibility age from 65 to 60 and threw his support behind a proposal to forgive student debt for borrowers from low-income and middle-class families who attended public colleges and universities, historically black colleges and universities, and underfunded minority-serving institutions. Mr. Sanders has proposed free public education and the elimination of all student debt.

Mr. Biden has declined to endorse Medicare-for-All, the single-payer health-care plan that was the centerpiece of Mr. Sanders’s campaign. Some Sanders backers were unimpressed with Mr. Biden’s new Medicare proposal. Mrs. Clinton in 2016 backed giving Americans access to Medicare starting at age 50. Some younger voters said the former vice president’s less-generous plan did little to expand goodwill with the demographic Mr. Biden struggled to attract in the primaries.

“I haven’t heard a single of my peers jumping through the roof knowing that they’ll have health care when they’re 60 instead of 65 when many of them are unemployed or underemployed and looking for health care right now,” said Evan Weber, political director of the climate-focused organization Sunrise Movement. The group is part of a coalition of liberal organizations that have made a list of requests to Mr. Biden, including on health care.

“Bernie is not going to be able to convince supporters to support Biden without anything concrete. People love Bernie but that will not happen,” said Roseann DeMoro, an activist and longtime adviser to Mr. Sanders. Ms. DeMoro said to get support from some of Mr. Sanders’s most passionate supporters, Mr. Biden would need to adopt some of Mr. Sanders’s policy proposals, such as a single-payer health-care system, not just move to the left.

Otherwise, she warned, some Democrats might not turn out for Mr. Biden in the November election.

In a direct appeal to Mr. Sanders’s supporters on Monday, Mr. Biden said, “I see you, I hear you, I understand the urgency of what it is that we have to get done in this country.”