Yesterday was another bad one for Republicans. Bernie Sanders went on a video chat with Joe Biden and urged his supporters to back the former vice president. Last night, the Wisconsin votes were counted and Democrats unseated a Republican member of the state’s Supreme Court. In other words, Democrats are united heading into the presidential cycle and Democrats will brave a pandemic to vote Republicans out of office. 

Sanders’ supporters have been bashing Biden relentlessly ever since the Vermont Senator dropped out of the race. Some have been demonizing Biden and bringing up the old trope that there’s no difference between the parties. Anybody watching American politics right now knows how ridiculous that argument sounds. Now, they must either admit that their leader is wrong or they need to fall in line. Or they need to come with some other conspiracy theory about Bernie being threatened or blackmailed. 

For most Sanders’ supporters, the choice between Biden and four more years of Donald Trump is obvious. They may be no fans of Biden’s incremental approach to governing but they know that Donald Trump has been an unmitigated disaster. They can unite behind Bernie to make him a one term president and hope to get their agenda pushed through a much more progressive Congress.

In Wisconsin, Republicans did as much as they could to rig the election for the supreme court. The state’s voter suppression laws are more draconian that North Carolina’s. They have a strict ID law and would make no exceptions for voting in the midst of a pandemic. They rejected moving the election like other states have done. They demanded photos be sent in with any mail-in ballots and insisted on notaries signing ballots. 

Republicans believed the low voter turnout and difficult access to more limited polling places in Wisconsin would benefit them. It didn’t work out that way. People still went to the polls while the Republican Speaker of the House showed up in a hazmat fashion claiming that voting was safe. Nothing says, “I don’t care about you” more than forcing people to put their health at risk to exercise their constitutional rights. When the votes were counted the Democrat won by more than 10 supports, surprising people on both sides. 

Bernie’s endorsement of Joe Biden shows a Democratic Party unified with a clear mission to defeat Donald Trump. They’ll set aside policy disputes until they can fight them out as a party in power. The result in Wisconsin could foreshadow a devastating year for Republicans. Few statewide elections have been decided by more than a few points. Last night was a blowout, possibly signaling a rejection of the GOP in general. If Trump loses Wisconsin in November, he will almost certainly lose the White House.