A nearly 30-point win has given the Biden campaign new life, but Bernie Sanders still has a good opportunity to significantly widen his delegate lead on Super Tuesday.
A nearly 30-point win has given the Biden campaign new life, but Bernie Sanders still has a good opportunity to significantly widen his delegate lead on Super Tuesday.
A week ago, Joe Biden’s campaign looked like it might be on death’s door.
On Saturday, February 22, the day of the Nevada caucuses, his lead in South Carolina had shrunk to 2.3 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. But Biden’s second-place finish in Nevada, Tuesday’s debate in South Carolina, and Wednesday’s endorsement of Biden by Jim Clyburn — the influential 14-term South Carolina congressman and House majority whip — all made one thing clear: The former vice president was the only viable alternative to Bernie Sanders in the first-in-the-South primary. In the final RCP polling average of South Carolina, Biden led Sanders by 15 points. His margin of victory was nearly twice as large on Saturday.
Biden walked away from South Carolina with 39 delegates; Sanders took only 15. Overall, the Vermont socialist has only a narrow delegate lead over Biden. Even though Sanders won the most votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden’s margin of victory in South Carolina was wide enough that the former vice president has won the most Democratic-primary votes to date.
A look at the South Carolina exit poll reveals even better news for Biden: He won not only by running up the score among African-American voters, but he carried white voters by double digits as well. Black voters were 56 percent of the South Carolina Democratic-primary electorate, and Biden carried that group 61 percent to 17 percent over Sanders. White voters made up 40 percent of the South Carolina primary electorate, and Biden carried them 33 percent to 23 percent over Sanders.
Biden’s performance among white Democrats on Saturday is important because in several of the Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, black voters will make up a much smaller share of the electorate than they did in South Carolina. Although black voters were a majority in Alabama (54 percent) in the 2016 Democratic primary, they accounted for less than a third of voters in the other Southern states voting on Super Tuesday: North Carolina (32 percent), Arkansas (27 percent), Oklahoma (14 percent), Tennessee (32 percent), Virginia (26 percent), and Texas (19 percent).
Biden’s performance on Saturday suggests that he has a chance of winning all of those states, although Virginia and Texas are the most uncertain. In the two Virginia polls released in the past week, one showed Biden ahead by five points while the other showed Sanders ahead by nine points.
In Texas, Sanders has led in the last seven polls — by margins ranging from 4 points to 17 points — and Biden has to worry about splitting the relatively moderate vote there with Michael Bloomberg, who has spent over half a billion dollars mostly aimed at Super Tuesday contests. One poll released last week suggests that Bloomberg’s presence in the race could help Sanders win the Lonestar State.
Of course, Super Tuesday marks the point in the race when the number of states in which a candidate finishes first is less important than the overall delegate haul: one-third of all 3,979 Democratic National Convention delegates are up for grabs tomorrow.
Bernie Sanders will very likely emerge with a wider delegate lead on Super Tuesday; the only real question is whether Biden can limit Sanders’s gains to a number that he might reasonably overcome.
What Biden needs to do on Super Tuesday is keep things close in Texas, where 228 delegates are at stake, and run up the score in the rest of the South, where 393 delegates are at stake. If he does that, Biden can compensate for losses in the whiter and more liberal states where Sanders is strong: Colorado, Maine, Vermont, Utah, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. There are 302 total delegates in those Super Tuesday states, and Sanders will build a sizable delegate lead over Biden here even though Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren still have a decent chance of coming in first in their home states.
The biggest question is what exactly happens in California, where 415 delegates are at stake. It’s pretty much a given that Bernie Sanders will win. The RealClearPolitics average of California polls shows him leading by nearly 20 points: Sanders 34.4 percent, Warren 16.2 percent, Biden 13.2 percent, Bloomberg 11.6 percent, Buttigieg 9.0 percent. To keep Sanders from building a big delegate lead in California, Biden badly needs to clear the 15 percent threshold necessary to win delegates. And in a race that is rapidly evolving, there’s good reason to think he can do that. The South Carolina results will nudge some undecided voters toward Biden, and Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race last night. Buttigieg’s departure could very well help both Warren and Biden clear the 15 percent threshold in California and tamp down Sanders’s overall delegate haul from the Golden State — and that could turn the race for the Democratic presidential nomination into a toss-up between the former vice president and the socialist senator from Vermont.