Super Tuesday rolls up
Biden scores big; Sanders takes California
ASHBURN, Va. — The Joe Biden comeback continues. The former vice president streaked to several significant wins in the biggest slate of Democratic primary elections Tuesday, building on the Saturday victory in South Carolina that reinvigorated his 2020 campaign.
The results brought Biden dramatically closer to the front-runner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, as Democrats voted in 14 states on Super Tuesday, the most expansive day of the nominating contest. Combined with the South Carolina results three days earlier, Tuesday’s results altered a race that had looked like Sanders’ race to lose.
It now looks increasingly like a two-person contest for the nomination, with the Democratic establishment, and voters across the map, rallying behind Biden.
“It’s a good night and it seems to be getting even better,” Biden told cheering supporters in Los Angeles, a few weeks after many wondered if his campaign was doomed. “They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing . ... It’s still early, but things are looking awful, awful good.”
Biden swept the South, carrying Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, and Arkansas. He was also declared the winner in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, and scored a surprise victory in Minnesota after receiving a last-minute endorsement from homestate Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Virginia and North Carolina were called almost as soon as polls closed, suggesting that Biden had scored huge victories there and would win a substantial share of delegates toward the nomination in two of the largest states on the map, with 99 and 110 delegates, respectively.
Sanders, meanwhile, won Colorado, Utah, and his home state of Vermont — and the state with the biggest delegate prize of the night, California. But the popular-vote margin and the number of delegates he would carry out of that state weren’t immediately clear.
Texas, the secondlargest state voting, looked tight based on early results.
Still, the night dented one of the central premises of Sanders’ campaign: that he is the candidate who can bring out new voters, including disaffected liberals and working class people.
Instead, it was Biden who seemed to juice the electorate. In Virginia, turnout almost doubled compared to 2016, and Biden won more than half the vote in the state, while Sanders had about 23%. Instead of a surge of liberals, Biden rode a wave of support from blacks, as well as moderate voters who have turned away from the GOP in affluent, Democratic-trending suburbs similar to the ones outside Philadelphia.
“People are talking about revolution, we’ve started a movement,” Biden said in a dig at Sanders’ frequent calls for a “political revolution.”
“We’ve increased turnout, the turnout’s turned out for us,” Biden said.
“It’s a state that’s urban, rural, suburban,” said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Biden supporter. “It’s a real composite of who America is, and I think this was a huge win for Joe Biden because it goes to electability, for me, in the general election.”
The margins of victory in each state are critical, because delegates are awarded proportionally, not on a winner-take-all basis.
Sanders, speaking to supporters in Essex Junction, Vt., seemed to acknowledge the new, stiffer competition, sharply contrasting himself with Biden.
“One of us in this race led the opposition to the war in Iraq — you’re looking at him,” Sanders said. “Another candidate voted for the war in Iraq. One of us led the opposition to disastrous trade agreements which cost us millions of good-paying jobs — and that’s me. And another candidate voted for disastrous trade agreements.”
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, was trailing well behind, despite having poured more than $500 million into advertising and staffing across the country, much of it in the Super Tuesday states. He won in American Samoa but was said to be reconsidering his campaign’s future after a poor showing in his first night on the primary ballot.