'Never Trump' Republicans tell me they'll vote for a Democrat this year — just not Bernie Sanders

A private jet is about to leave Indiana for Dallas, where both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are expected to endorse Joe Biden ahead of Tuesday's votes

It has taken British journalists a while to see how likely Bernie Sanders is to be the Democratic nominee this November (AP)

It's decision time for Democrats in 14 states and one US territory.

By the time the sun sets on California on what has come to be known as Super Tuesday, 1,357 of the pledged delegates candidates will need before they can face off against Donald Trump on November's general election ballot will have gotten their marching orders from voters.

And the choice those voters will face is getting starker by the minute. The Democratic field, once bursting with as many as 20 candidates, narrowed to five on Monday when Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar let it be known that she'd be dropping out of the race.

Klobuchar, a popular figure in her home state — one of the 14 that vote on Super Tuesday — announced she'd be traveling to Texas to appear with and offer her endorsement to former Vice President Joe Biden.

This latest development was yet another stunning turn in a 72-hour period that has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune for Biden, who on Saturday won his first-ever presidential primary contest in South Carolina. He did so with the overwhelming support of the Palmetto State's African American community, who came out to vote for him in droves after the dean of South Carolina Democratic politics, Rep. James Clyburn, offered an enthusiastic endorsement.

Biden's victory brought him within striking distance of the current delegate count leader, Vermont's Bernie Sanders. Less than a day later, the only candidate to defeat Sanders so far, ex-South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, announced that he would withdraw from contention and suspend his campaign.

Buttigieg, at only 38 years old, has earned his place in history as the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential nominating content by besting Sanders — whose political career dates back to before Buttigieg's birth — in this year's Iowa caucus.

And while he passed the mantle of the youngest male candidate in the Democratic field to Biden (yes, really), Buttigieg didn't explicitly offer his endorsement — or did he?

In remarks to supporters announcing his withdrawal, the young son of South Bend tapped into the vein of Obama-esque eloquence that has catapulted him from an unknown to a household name one more time, to lay out the stakes of the fight Democrats still face.

“With every passing day, I am more and more convinced that the only way we will defeat Trump and Trumpism is with a new politics that gathers people together. We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart. We need a broad-based agenda that can truly deliver for the American people, not one that gets lost in ideology,“ Buttigieg said, adding that Democrats ”need an approach strong enough not only to win the White House but to hold the House, win the Senate and send Mitch McConnell into retirement.“

“And that broad and inclusive politics, that is the politics that we've attempted to model through this campaign — that I believe is the way forward for our eventual nominee,” he continued. “So I urge everyone who supported me to continue in the cause of ensuring that we bring change to the White House in working to win the absolutely critical down-ballot races playing out across the country this year.”

Down-ballot races.

Those three words took Buttigieg as far as he could go that night towards explicitly endorsing the former Veep without uttering the words Joseph Robinette Biden.

And it looks like Buttigieg will go farther still today. According to a campaign source, the once (and perhaps future) presidential candidate will board a private jet leaving South Bend in a few hours. It'll be heading to Dallas, where Klobuchar is set to announce her endorsement of Biden.

There, the former VP — who'd been written off for politically dead just three weeks ago — will pull two massive electoral rabbits out of one hat.

The down-ballot effect talked about by Mayor Pete has been one of Biden's selling points since the 2020 race began, but the developments of the last few days indicate that candidates not named Bernie Sanders are starting to believe it.

And for the suburban swing voters, moderate Republicans, Never-Trumpers, and garden-variety Democrats whose votes will determine the fate of the House majority and who will occupy the White House, Biden's newfound “Joe-mentum” is bringing forth sighs of relief.

On Saturday, I spent a good chunk of my time at the back of the National Press Club's storied ballroom, where approximately 250 disaffected Republicans gathered for a “summit on principled conservatism.” The event was hosted by Stand Up Republic, the group founded by 2016 independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn.

This wasn't a room that was very friendly to Donald Trump, bar Will Chamberlain, an ex-litigator and conservative activist who is currently the editor-in-chief of the recently revived “Human Events”, the conservative magazine once known as Ronald Reagan's favorite news source.

Chamberlain, who resurrected the once-respected title as an online peon to an intellectualized Trumpism, was there to confront a panel of prominent Never-Trump conservatives, including CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter, ex-Jeb Bush communications guru Tim Miller, and Running Against The Devil author Rick Wilson over an appearance Wilson made on CNN some weeks back.

After he asked panelists whether they would condemn Wilson's reference to some Trump supporters as possibly illiterate “ten-toothed rubes,” Wilson hit back by asking if Chamberlain considered everyone in the room to be “human scum,” as Trump has described Republicans who find his conservative credentials and character wanting.

“I'm sorry that the ‘f**k your feelings’ crowd can't take the fact that I'm a pirate and that I talk the way I do. And I'm sorry their delicate little feelings are hurt when they get called out,” said Wilson. “The fact of the matter is, we're not going to give you a participation trophy and let you wear some mantle of victimization, because you've embraced a guy who puts kids in cages, you embrace the guy who s**ts on the rule of law and the Constitution, you've embraced a guy who is outright running roughshod over the laws of this country. And if I call you a name, tough.”

The crowd, as the saying goes, went wild with applause. Even Tom Nichols, a prominent Never-Trumper who teaches at the Naval War College and pens a column for USA Today, was all but hanging from the balcony as he (and the rest of the audience) cheered Wilson on.

But as much as those who would stand against Donald Trump on the right — many of them lifelong Republicans — are open to voting for a Democrat this November, a vote for Sanders would be a bridge too far for some.

Charlie Sykes, the ex-talk radio host who edits The Bulwark, suggested that the down-ballot effects of nominating Sanders would be such that the American left could be judged to have lost their collective minds if they nominate him.

Even Nichols, who has publicly pledged to vote for whoever the Democrats nominate, told me that were Sanders to lose to Trump, Democratic Party leaders like Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who first allowed Sanders to gate-crash the 2016 Democratic primary — would be known as “gravediggers of democracy.”

Another attendee I spoke to said he was a lifelong Republican who’d be breaking with his party for the first time, but lamented that he could never vote for Sanders. He was wearing a Mike Bloomberg campaign button.

It's easy to caricature such people as plutocrats who would never vote for a Democrat anyway. Lord knows that Sanders supporters think Biden and his fellow “moderate” Democrats are closet Republicans anyway, but it's worth remembering that Sanders isn't and has never been a Democrat.

Perhaps by Tuesday night, we'll know if Democratic voters have remembered it, too.