Looking at the polls, I’d expect him to take Alabama, Tennessee and probably North Carolina. But is a big win in a state he was already widely expected to carry really going to push him over the top in Texas, where he is running eight points behind Sanders and where the Democratic electorate is heavily Latino? Or Virginia, where the D.C. wonketariat is gaga for the technocratic stylings of Warren, Buttigieg and Bloomberg, and where a large youth vote is clearly in the Sanders camp?

Biden, in other words, seems to be doing really well in what Flannery O’Connor dubbed the “Christ-haunted” South. But that’s the place where Sanders is particularly bad at campaigning. I heard some of his surrogates onstage working stilted religious references into their speeches and looked around at a crowd that clearly wasn’t overly familiar with the Bible and thought, why are they bothering? They just don’t speak fluent Church Lady and neither does anyone else here…

The problem is that once you get outside of the South, and particularly in the big states, the Democratic electorate looks more like the people who have been voting for Sanders than it does like conservative southern black voters. If Biden runs the tables in the South on Tuesday, and Sanders wins everywhere else, is the party going to nominate the guy who carried California and Texas and Massachusetts, or the guy who won all the states that are virtually guaranteed to vote for a Republican come November?