No sooner did it become clear that Joe Biden was the big winner on Super Tuesday than the decibel level of the "Mike Bloomberg Must Go!" talk among Democrats was rising.
Should the billionaire former mayor of New York City withdraw from the presidential nomination battle, the current thinking among centrist Democrats indicates that it would make it much easier for Biden to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, and raise their chances of unseating President Donald Trump.
"The vote for Biden could be viewed as an anti-socialist vote, as he did well with moderate Dem voters in rural areas," veteran polling analyst Jay O'Callaghan told Newsmax. "Sanders suffered a major setback, which will result in an increasingly divided Democrat Party."
With near-final returns in Tuesday night, Biden defeated Sanders or was leading him in 10 of the 14 states choosing delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
Most dramatically, the former vice president carried Massachusetts, the home state of his opponent Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Minnesota, where Sanders had been considered a strong favorite after the withdrawl from the race of the Gopher State's own Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
In contrast, Sanders turned in a mediocre performance on Tuesday: he carried California, Colorado (which chooses delegates via caucuses), Utah, and his home state of Vermont.
As for Bloomberg, he won four of the six national convention delegates from American Samoa after weeks of spending an estimated $300 million of his own wealth in Super Tuesday states.
Bloomberg "now has no case for continuing the race after spending what is tantamount to $75 million per delegate," Robert Juliano, a retired labor lobbyist and a Biden friend for 40 years, told Newsmax. "The pressure on him to leave and support [Biden] is going to be strong."
Once written off as a has-been and predicted to be finished in the race himself, Biden began a dynamic rebound following his landslide win in the Feb. 29 South Carolina primary.
In Juliano's words, "Joey's resurrection happened pretty rapidly, in fact in about 36 hours — first South Carolina, then other candidates [former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Klobuchar] getting out of the race to back him."
Juliano also referenced several Biden endorsements from Democratic Party leaders and people who worked in the Obama administration.
Among the notable Obama-related endorsements for Biden were those of former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, both former Republican-elected officials who still consider themselves Republicans (LaHood was a House member from Illinois, and Hagel was a senator from Nebraska).
The common denominator of most of the fast-breaking support for Biden was that he was not Sanders, whose outspoken leftist views Democratic leaders fear could frighten away moderate voters and lead to the reelection of President Donald Trump.
It will soon become clear if Bloomberg joins them.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.