Aside from the genuine fringe crank Marianne Williamson, Biden is clearly and obviously the worst possible candidate the Dems could have picked: so it was inevitable that this would be the outcome.

He is palpably the worst candidate in terms of both his ability to win the general and in terms of what a Biden administration would be like, in the horrific circumstances in which it would then have to govern if it were successful in achieving the former.

The Dems, both the party elites and ordinary primary voters, have looked at the lessons of 2016. They have studied them. And the conclusion they came to was: "let's do the same thing again, only with a candidate who is manifestly worse in every way."

If the Dems manage to pull off the feat of losing to a nakedly corrupt lunatic, who is in the midst of condemning the nation to an utter catastrophe in its handling of the pandemic, it would be an unsurpassed achievement in incompetence.

Yet pulling this off is not beyond them, as the outcome of this primary clearly shows. If that is indeed how it turns out, the Democratic Party will not survive. And nor should it.