WILMINGTON, Del. — Joe Biden made the short drive from his now-famous basement, jogged into the high school gym where he usually votes and excoriated President Donald Trump as failing miserably to protect the health and safety of Americans.

Then, after laying out his own plan to slow the coronavirus, the presumptive Democratic nominee made what now amounts to news in this bizarre election: He opened the floor to questions from reporters, waving off aides when they tried to cut him off and marveling at how strange this has all become.

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The latest Democratic primary battle between the party’s establishment and its progressive wing is coming to the must-win Colorado Senate race on Tuesday.

Former Gov. John Hickenlooper, whom Democrats recruited into the race after he abandoned a poorly performing presidential campaign, is trying to fend off challenger Andrew Romanoff from his left and secure the nomination to face Sen. Cory Gardner, one of the two most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection this year.

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As the Democratic primary drew to its conclusion, a flurry of Students for Bernie college organizations made clear where they stood: There was no way they could vote for Joe Biden. If Sanders wasn’t the nominee, they planned to either sit out the fall election or vote third party.

But as coronavirus deaths mount and Donald Trump strikes a law-and-order pose against the protests sweeping the nation, many of the leaders of those groups are rethinking their hard-line position. And faced with a choice between a candidate they distrust due to his lack of progressive bona fides, or ushering in the second term of an incumbent they loathe, more than a few leftist college student leaders are learning to live with Biden.

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Progressive leaders on and off Capitol Hill are emboldened after Tuesday’s high-stakes primaries, with the success of a slew of hand-picked candidates signaling the left is far from finished in the battle for the Democratic Party’s future.

The biggest prize, of course, is the looming victory of Jamaal Bowman over House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel. The "Medicare for All" and "Green New Deal"-backing challenger was once a long shot to defeat the powerful incumbent, but the establishment’s late rescue effort proved futile.

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Bernie Sanders has raised more than $750,000 for congressional and local candidates in Tuesday’s primaries, his aides told POLITICO.

The Vermont senator’s team also texted more than 120,000 of his supporters to promote the progressives he endorsed in races in New York and Kentucky. His staffers said videos boosting the contenders have received more than 1 million views on social media.

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Desperate for victory after watching the presidential nomination slip through their fingers, progressives have found a new cause to rally around.

Across the country, they’re channeling their grief, volunteer muscle and small-dollar donations into Jamaal Bowman, a left-wing candidate in New York trying to oust decades-long incumbent Congressman Eliot Engel.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren backed progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman over longtime incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel on Tuesday, further fueling the endorsement slugfest in one of the nation's most watched primaries.

Warren (D-Mass.) is the latest national progressive icon to support Bowman — a middle school principal challenging a 16-term congressman and House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman in a New York district that spans from the Bronx to Westchester County.

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Amy McGrath is a national Democratic icon for her bid to take out Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader and reviled figure on the left, raising tens of millions of dollars to fuel her campaign.

But McConnell isn't the opponent McGrath, a former fight pilot, is sweating most right now. Instead, it's her rival in the June 23 Democratic primary: state Rep. Charles Booker, who was virtually ignored for months but now has all the momentum in the closing days of the election.

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If Democrats win back the Senate this fall, don't expect a rush to pass the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.

The left wing has been wiped out in Senate primaries or failed to recruit at all in states across the map this year, leaving a slate of centrist candidates more in the ideological mold of Joe Biden than Bernie Sanders. Liberal insurgents on the ballot over the coming weeks in states like Kentucky and Colorado aren't favored to fare any better, failing to gain significant traction thus far against more moderate favorites.

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Days before Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign, a prominent law professor tore apart her record in a New York Times op-ed arguing that the California senator was not, as she defined herself, a “progressive prosecutor.”

The scathing critique by Lara Bazelon was followed by months of criticism of Harris’ career as a district attorney and state attorney general, thwarting her efforts to win over reform-minded liberals.

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Many Democratic leaders were irate in 2016 over what they saw as Bernie Sanders’ failure to fully get behind Hillary Clinton and work hard to get her elected.

Four years later, they’re heaping praise on the Vermont senator and his top brass for their efforts to put Joe Biden in the White House.

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Bernie world is tearing itself apart.

As election results across the country rolled in on Tuesday evening, current and former aides to Bernie Sanders abruptly laced into each other on social media, trading accusations of being “tone-deaf,” not giving “a shit about the base,” and even stealing infrastructure from the 2020 campaign.

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On the eve of the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders and his supporters were feeling invincible.

“I've got news for the Democratic establishment,” he declared on Twitter on Feb. 21, the day before he went on to a landslide win in the Nevada caucuses. “They can't stop us.”

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Bernie Sanders has shown that he can transform Democratic politics.

Harnessing the left-wing movement he created has been trickier.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday named the co-chairs and members of their joint task forces meant to shore up Democratic Party unity ahead of November’s general election.

The announcement follows through on a pledge the two men made last month — when Sanders, the runner-up in the Democratic presidential primary, endorsed Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee — to establish working groups to advise the Biden campaign on six key policy areas: climate change, criminal justice reform, economy, education, health care, and immigration.

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Jess Scarane is campaigning for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat with a striking message for a Delaware Democrat: She believes his accuser, Tara Reade.

Scarane, who said she is a victim of sexual assault, tweeted in March that when she listened to Reade talk about her claims, “the assault I experienced as a teen at my first job came rushing back. She was telling my story, too. Almost word for word.” She has called on Chris Coons, the incumbent she is trying to oust and a top Biden ally, to support an investigation.

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How does a campaign take a 77-year-old man — who admits he needs his granddaughter's help with his cellphone and pitches himself as sober and reasonable — and make him go viral?

That perplexing challenge has become a consuming focus of Joe Biden’s campaign as it tries to finally up its digital game to compete against a challenger who not only understands intuitively how to generate clicks and buzz — but boasts a massive and sophisticated digital operation to amplify his message.

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Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have reached a compromise on delegates for the Democratic National Convention, avoiding a potentially messy fight.

Sanders was set to potentially lose hundreds of delegates due to a little-known clause within the Democratic National Committee’s delegate allocation rules, as POLITICO reported earlier this week.

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When Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential bid, he said he still wanted to stay on the ballot in the remaining states to pick up more delegates and gain clout to influence the party at the national convention.

But a series of factors — from New York state’s Monday decision to cancel its primary to the Democratic National Committee’s complicated process of reallocating delegates for candidates who exit the race — is getting in the way of Sanders’ plan, kicking off a new round of Democratic infighting that echoes Sanders partisans’ complaints about the 2016 election.

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Mike Bloomberg’s now-shuttered campaign for president informed former staffers Monday that he would cover the cost of their health care coverage through November.

The note to aides came after several field staffers alleged in a series of lawsuits that they were tricked into taking jobs with Bloomberg by being promised salaries and health insurance through the general election — regardless of whether the billionaire former New York City mayor remained a candidate for president.

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