One of the reasons put forward for Sanders’ poor performance in SC and over Super Tuesday has been that he isn’t good at building coalitions, and that Biden is. The narrative, it goes, is that Biden was good at that, especially in the south and particularly with black folks. There is a lot wrong with the narrative, of course. If one reviews the record (e.g. search for news related to events he held, attended, or legislative initiatives he pushed while VP or as a Senator), Biden's history with respect to black people in America is bi-modal, both in time and structure: one mode is incredibly racist (e.g. busing, credit card company protection) and the other is that he was Obama's VP.

But what is a "coalition"? On the surface, technically a coalition is any agreement between factions with differing goals or priorities to temporarily work together toward a common goal. Coalitions are either friendly (the common goal is perceived to benefit each faction's goals) or adversarial (mostly misaligned long-term goals, but a more important short-term goal that is aimed at harming an enemy). The use of "coalition" is a bit of propaganda: the leadership and pundit class in the democratic party want folks to think it's the more positive, relationship-building kind of coalition and use it in that sense when they say "Biden's good at building coalitions, Bernie isn't."

The fact is, though, that the group that has beaten Bernie isn't a coalition: mostly the people involved in the "coalition" that Biden supposedly built have identical or strongly overlapping goals and priorities. When a group of people with highly aligned goals and priorities band together to defeat a common enemy, that isn't a coalition, it's simply a single group working toward a common purpose. Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg: they're all part of the same group, that is, a center/center-right faction in the democratic party with a goal to maintain the status quo, protect their own power, and protect the wealth and status of their friends. Part of that is advancing policies that act like tiny bandaids on the gaping wounds of the lower classes, but for the most part real change and inclusion of the 99% isn't on their agenda. Bernie opposed this, and so the minor squabble regarding who gets to lead the faction was set aside to take the enemy out.

The party didn't have to cheat. The system itself is rigged, but legally, by the efforts of the two major political parties to structure election law in their favor. They simply had to direct the personalities in the leadership class to fall in line to generate a majority of primary votes. For forty years and more the party has shown us that they are not progressive, not liberal, and prefer a comfortable, center/center-right status quo over real change. The democratic leadership class have projected for months now a rising panic at the thought of Bernie being the nominee. All of the other candidates in opposition to Bernie's were more or less the same center/center-right party hacks. They all more or less agree in principle that "republican-lite" policies are good to pursue. The contest was a popularity contest. At the first sign it may have resulted in Bernie's nomination the contest was scuttled in favor of the more important thing: tribal cohesion against an insurgent.

And democratic voters, just like voters in general, tend not to pay attention until close to their vote, when the media narrative is much more important than anything else.

What we've seen in 2016 and 2020 isn't rampant cheating: it's one symptom of a failed republic that doesn't recognize it has failed yet, and that is controlled by the wealthy.