2020 hopefuls eye Super Tuesday even as 2 other states loom
Nevada votes next and then South Carolina. But top Democrats vying for their party’s presidential nomination are already looking ahead to the biggest prize on the primary calendar: Super Tuesday, the slate of contests when more than a dozen states go to the polls.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is holding a town hall on Thursday night in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia, a day before Sen. Bernie Sanders makes two North Carolina stops, then hits Texas. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will campaign in California between fundraisers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
All four states vote March 3, along with a crush of others, from Alabama to Colorado and from Maine to Utah, as well as Warren’s home state of Massachusetts and Sanders’ native Vermont. More than 1,300 delegates to the Democratic National Convention are at stake, about a third of the total.
The focus on Super Tuesday comes at a pivotal point in the campaign. For Sanders and Buttigieg, who have emerged in strong positions after contests in Iowa and in New Hampshire, the travel gives them an opportunity to show their national appeal and woo larger concentrations of nonwhite voters. For struggling candidates like Warren, it’s a signal that they are still in the fight.
And for everyone, it’s a chance to prove they won’t cede this swath of delegate-rich states to Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor who has spent months building his campaign around Super Tuesday. He campaigned in Tennessee on Wednesday and will be in Texas and North Carolina on Thursday.
“All bets are off this cycle,” said Texas Democratic strategist Colin Strother, who is bullish on Bloomberg’s chances of resonating in his state and beyond.
So far, there’s no sign that candidates are completely bypassing Nevada or South Carolina. Every leading contender will be in Nevada this weekend as early voting begins. Democrats will caucus there on Feb. 22.
But some are shifting their resources as they begin an awkward balancing act of paying attention to the remaining early states while stockpiling enough money to keep themselves in the conversation in the bevy of contests unfolding next month. Warren, for instance, will be in South Carolina on Friday but is pulling television advertising from the state after this weekend. Some of that money will instead go to the Super Tuesday state of Maine.
Bloomberg, who is selffunding his campaign, doesn’t have to make such considerations. He’s skipped the first four states to deploy a political shock-and-awe campaign after that, spending heavily on television ads while already hiring more than 2,100 staffers in 40 states and U.S. territories, including all voting on Super Tuesday.
Past candidates have tried to forgo the early states in favor of larger ones voting later, with little success — including another former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, in 2008. But Bloomberg is making a larger bet on doing so than anyone has. He’s worth an estimated $60 billion and has already spent more than $200 million to hastily build a campaign infrastructure — with promises of plenty more where that came from.
As the Democratic presidential race hurtles toward Nevada, candidates in the still-crowded field are jumping into their first test in a racially diverse state with solid union muscle and shaky plans for a presidential caucus.
Nevada has no obvious frontrunner, though Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders heads into the contest on strong footing. The state has received only a sliver of the attention of the first two states on the primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire. Looking at the jumbled field, the state’s most powerful union decided to take a pass on endorsing a candidate, rather than make a divisive choice or risk picking a loser. Most of the state’s most prominent officials have stayed neutral.
The open race has every Democrat spending much of the next week searching for fortunes in the state’s working-class neighborhoods, union halls, casino convention halls and stuccoed suburbs. For Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, it’s a chance to prove their staying power after strong finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. For former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, it could be a life preserver to rescue their bids after disappointing starts. For Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, it’s a chance to prove her thirdplace finish in New Hampshire wasn’t a fluke.
Candidates are making a get-out-the-vote push Saturday morning as early voting starts, and they plan to attend a Saturday night fundraising gala for the Las Vegas-based Clark County Democratic Party. Several candidates are making the hourlong flight up to Reno, a city newly flush with tech money and California transplants, and are due back in Las Vegas on Wednesday for the ninth Democratic debate.
This year, with the results of Iowa’s caucuses muddled by technology and reporting problems, Nevada is under pressure to pull off a problemfree caucus. The Nevada State Democratic Party abandoned its original plans to use an app like the one that caused trouble in Iowa and has scrambled to come up with a new system to tabulate results.
The state party said this week that it will try to use simpler technology and a backup paper record, though election experts have warned that deploying new technology and processes without sufficient training can cause problems.
The party has been fortified and professionalized over the years by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The organizing force of the party and its allies is still referred to as the “Reid Machine,” and many of his former staffers hold key roles on the presidential campaigns.
The 80-year-old former senator, who retired in 2016 and has been battling cancer, has repeatedly said he won’t endorse before Nevada’s caucuses. His decision not to back a candidate in the still-volatile field has been echoed by many of Nevada’s top elected officials, including the governor, two Democratic senators and two of three Democratic members of the House.
The state’s most powerful union also decided not to endorse. The 60,000-member casino workers’ Culinary Union announced Thursday it would work instead to get out the vote and defeat President Donald Trump in 2020. The decision was a particular blow to Biden, who has long-standing ties to the union and needed an extra boost heading into Nevada.
While no candidate has earned its backing, the union hasn’t been shy about discouraging support for Sanders and Warren, whose “Medicare For All” plans would move to a government-run insurance system. The union, which prizes the health care plans its members bargained hard for over the years, said its insurance would be doomed under Medicare for All.