LATINOS, YOUTH RALLY FOR BERNIE
Sen. Bernie Sanders won California’s presidential primary Tuesday night, but former Vice President Joe Biden swept to decisive wins in most other Super Tuesday states around the country and seemed likely to pick up a significant haul of Golden State delegates.
Energizing his base of young and Latino voters with a call for revolutionary change in one of the most unequal states in the country, Sanders had a commanding lead in early California returns and held onto it as votes filtered in late Tuesday.
But Biden — who all but ignored California until Election Day — picked up victory after victory across the South, buoyed by black voters and consolidating moderate support, in a remarkable comeback from his floundering results in the first presidential contests early last month.
He won in Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia and Tennessee, while Sanders was declared the victor in Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont. Maine and Texas were too close to call.
Sanders’ campaign had hoped to build up a strong delegate lead on Super Tuesday with huge margins of victory in California and Texas, the biggest prizes on the map. Instead, projections Tuesday night instead suggested he was likely to
narrowly trail Biden in delegates by the time votes were counted across the country.
“They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing,” an ecstatic Biden declared at a rally in Los Angeles. “It’s still early, but things are looking awful, awful good.”
The other two major contenders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, appeared sure to lose every state — making the Democratic race look more and more like a two-man contest. Bloomberg, who spent a historymaking half-billion dollars of his own fortune on his campaign, planned to reassess today whether he would stay in the race, The New York Times reported.
Exit polls showed that late-deciding voters broke for Biden in many states, including the Southern contests that he dominated. Notably, he won Oklahoma and Minnesota, which went for Sanders during his 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton, and also beat Warren in her home state of Massachusetts.
Sanders was defiant in a speech in Vermont, blasting Biden for his past support for the Iraq War and trade deals.
“We cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics,” Sanders told cheering supporters. “What we need is a new kind of politics ... that brings young people into our political movement.”
Biden’s victories show that he has gained real momentum after winning South Carolina on Saturday and picking up endorsements from former rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke on Monday.
Many Democratic voters at polling places around California said Tuesday that they were voting with their heads instead of their hearts — supporting the candidates they thought would be most viable in the primary or could defeat President Trump in the general election, instead of those they most agreed with.
“Usually it’s about whose policies and opinions I like best, but for me, this time, the main thing was who would be the most electable,” said Sunnyvale resident Mina Hwang, 49. While she said she preferred Sanders’ progressive proposals, she went with Biden because she didn’t “see enough people going for” the Vermont senator’s rhetoric.
The biggest question hanging over California’s results is how many candidates will qualify for the state’s 415 pledged delegates. The contenders need to reach 15% support statewide or 15% in individual congressional districts to get a share of the delegates.
Sanders, Biden and Bloomberg were all above that threshold when the first results came in Tuesday night, while Warren was slightly below it. But it will likely be days or weeks before enough votes are counted to clearly determine how they’ll divvy up the delegates.
Because the race has been in such flux over the last few days, the Election Day results — which will be counted in the days to come — may be significantly different from the early votes. Mail-in votes cast over the last few weeks, which were the first to be reported, are likely less favorable for Biden, who only gained momentum over the last few days, and also less favorable for Sanders, because young people more typically vote on Election Day.
“This is a race that was completely different five days ago, when Joe Biden was getting his concession speech ready,” said Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor. “He rebounded because people finally figured out who the anti-Bernie candidate is.”
But Kousser warned that Biden’s history of gaffes and missteps could come back to hurt him now that he was the undisputed moderate favorite: “Democrats voted for the idea of Joe Biden, and we don’t know whether the person or the candidate is going to live up to that,” he said.
While Sanders has campaigned heavily in California, barnstorming the state with massive rallies, Biden — who has pitched himself as a steady hand in the White House after four years of Trump — focused his energy elsewhere. He rushed to catch up on Election Day, dropping by an Oakland diner for his first public event in the Bay Area in the more than a year he’s been a presidential candidate and taking selfies with fans at a chicken-and-waffles restaurant in L.A.
Warren, who took aim at all three of her male rivals in a speech in Los Angeles on Monday night, has been arguing that she’d be able to unite voters divided between the progressive Sanders and the more moderate Biden.
And Bloomberg has been boosted by a historic $77 million in advertising spending that has made his face a ubiquitous presence on Californians’ televisions — but his rise was hamstrung by an abysmal debate performance last month, as well as Biden’s endorsements from other prominent moderates.
Many voters around California said it felt like the race had narrowed to Biden and Sanders — and their two deeply divergent visions for the Democratic Party’s path.
Los Angeles native June Malcolm, who attended Biden’s rally in the city, said she was turned off by some of Sanders’ past stances.
“I’ve always liked Biden. His policies continue where Obama left off,” Malcolm said. “I don’t believe in a revolution. We don’t need to go from one extreme to another on the left.”
But other voters stressed that they thought Sanders had a better chance of defeating Trump than a moderate like Biden.
At a polling place at a Methodist church in West Oakland, all five voters interviewed Tuesday morning — from a white selfdescribed gentrifier to a 60-year-old black native Oakland homeowner to a woman living far below the poverty line — said they were backing Sanders.
“He’s one of the only guys up there where I can tell he’s talking to me,” said Sam Tapley, a 27-yearold recent arrival from the East Coast. “He’s coming from a very truthful place. It doesn’t feel scripted. It doesn’t feel like someone’s feeding him notes.”