Biden’s delegate lead is small, but could be hard to overcome
Joe Biden not only reclaimed his status as a front-runner on Super Tuesday, but he also carved a clear path to amassing enough delegates to clinch the nomination by the Democratic National Convention.
Bernie Sanders, the left wing’s champion, has dodged a knockout blow for now. Though he has lost his lead in pledged delegates, he remains competitive in the delegate count, and he has probably stopped Biden well short of an overall majority of delegates awarded on Super Tuesday.
But a New York Times analysis suggests that the close delegate race might not last for long. If the race doesn’t take a decisive turn, Biden is likely to build an insurmountable delegate lead over the next few weeks.
Biden largely swept the Eastern half of the country, where most of the delegates awarded after Super Tuesday are at stake. And in many states, Sanders was able to forestall greater defeats only because of the large number of early voters who cast their ballots before the South Carolina race, when the party’s moderate voters were still divided. He will no longer have that advantage.
Biden got an additional lift Wednesday as his leading moderate rival, Michael Bloomberg, dropped out of the race. His departure could free additional moderate voters to join Biden, and it seems Bloomberg will be willing to use his considerable wealth to support him.
Even in the unlikely event that his voters don’t
break toward Biden, Bloomberg’s absence would allow Biden to claim even larger delegate majorities in the remaining Southern states. In Florida, for example, Bloomberg might have otherwise cleared the 15 percent threshold for earning delegates, at Biden’s expense.
Biden swept the South with expected, overwhelming support among African American voters, who backed him by a margin of 56 percent to 19 percent across the Super Tuesday states, according to exit polls. His success among white voters was less expected and allowed him to extend his strength well beyond the South.
He ran even or ahead among white voters in every state east of the Mississippi River, except for Sanders’ home state of Vermont, according to exit polls, and won decisive victories in the a±uent suburbs around Boston, Washington and Minneapolis. He carried much of the older, moderate rural vote that Sanders swept four years earlier in his contest against Hillary Clinton.
Biden rapidly consolidated moderate-leaning voters in the days after his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota left the race and endorsed him, with the result that he appeared to add nearly all their former supporters. His strength across the rural North and in a±uent suburbs mirrored their strengths in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
Biden also seemed to benefit from the high turnout in many states, particularly in many of the a±uent, well-educated metropolitan areas where Democrats have gained in recent years but where Sanders has long struggled. Sanders, in contrast, did not benefit from a long-promised surge in youth turnout, and his core base of support was overwhelmed across most of the South and even the North, where relatively liberal white voters make up a larger share of the electorate.
Texas offered a different test. The state’s Democratic electorate is a mix of African Americans and more conservative and a±uent white voters who tend to back Biden, and younger, urban and Latino voters who tend to back Sanders. According to the exit polls, Sanders won Latinos by a margin of 50 percent to 24 percent across the Super Tuesday states, with a margin of 41 percent to 24 percent in Texas.
In an election night count that reflected the shift in the national political environment over the last week, Biden eventually overtook Sanders in the Texas returns, with a wide advantage among late-deciding voters who cast their ballots on election day. In a telling indication of how quickly moderate voters had coalesced behind Biden, the exit polls across the Super Tuesday states found that among voters who decided in just the last few days, Biden won, 48 percent to 21 percent.
In North Carolina, which separates out early and election day results, Biden won just 28 percent among early voters but 41 percent of the vote statewide after winning 52 percent among election day voters. Bloomberg saw his support collapse in the election day vote.
Sanders denied Biden a more sweeping victory with decisive wins of his own in the West, where Sanders can count on his strengths among Latinos, liberals and younger, urban voters without fully facing his weakness among African American voters and conservative rural whites. The West also has the highest rate of early voting in the country, which helped blunt Biden’s surge.
Buttigieg and Klobuchar combined for 22 percent support in the exit poll in Colorado, where advance voters represented well more than half of all voters — the largest share of the vote of any state Tuesday. Their support was not recorded in the election night tabulation because they withdrew from the race, but they routinely breached 10 percent in early voting elsewhere in the country, including California.
The large early and absentee vote in some of the states most favorable to Sanders helped him in the delegate count, despite 10 losses in 14 states. Overall, Biden holds only 45 percent of pledged delegates after Super Tuesday, according to preliminary estimates, while Sanders is expected to finish with around 39 percent.
These tallies could change depending on the eventual result in California (which might not become official for weeks), but if they hold, Biden’s delegate lead would be far from irreversible. In fact, Sanders would need to defeat Biden by only 3 points in the remaining twothirds of the country to overtake him.
A 3-point deficit is not a daunting handicap, certainly not when Biden was polling 20 points lower just a few days ago. But the Super Tuesday results do not augur well for Sanders’ odds of pulling it off. He remained so competitive on Super Tuesday in part because of the large number of early and absentee voters who cast ballots before it became apparent that Biden was the viable moderate candidate.
The rest of the country may be even less favorable to Sanders. With Texas and California off the board, most of the remaining populous states lie in the East, where Sanders tended to lose in 2016, often badly. It is hard to identify any state where Sanders would be obviously favored outside of the
Northwest, if voters broke approximately as they did on Super Tuesday.
The states where Latino voters do represent roughly their average share of the electorate do not seem likely to be as favorable to Sanders as California or Texas. Arizona, New Mexico, New York and Florida allow only registered Democrats to vote, and therefore exclude a disproportionate number of young Hispanic voters — many of them registered as independents — who are likeliest to back Sanders. These closed primaries will exclude many young non-Latino voters as well, posing a broader challenge to Sanders that he did not overcome in 2016 and has not yet had to face in 2020.
Biden, in contrast, will continue to find many states in the next few weeks where black voters represent an average or above-average share of the population. He is all but assured to win commanding delegate majorities in Mississippi, Georgia and Florida. And there are many other states, including Missouri, Ohio and Michigan, where Biden would be the favorite if he could continue the pattern of his success with white voters in the East.
He needs around 54 percent of the remaining delegates to claim a majority heading into the convention, and his path to accomplishing this might be as simple as repeating a Super Tuesday outcome under a more favorable set of states, without the burden of early votes cast before he emerged as the top rival to Sanders.
Sanders now needs around 57 percent of the remaining delegates to claim a majority. To pull it off, he would need to post decisive victories in states he would have almost certainly lost if they had voted on Super Tuesday. He would probably need the race to fundamentally change in the coming weeks, as it has before.