Amy Klobuchar departed the race and announced she will endorse Joe Biden today, and Pete Buttigieg is also endorsing Biden tonight.
The supporters of those candidates will probably gravitate to Biden, but voters can surprise us. (Morning Consult didn’t ask Klobuchar supporters who their second choice was.) Separately, the Midwestern duo amounted to a pair of also-rans in most super Tuesday states, but if the majority of their supporters switch to Biden, they could give the former vice president a giant shot of adrenalin. Bad losses start to look not so bad, and some unwinnable states start to look winnable.
Start in Klobuchar’s home state. The most recent poll put Klobuchar at 29 percent in Minnesota, roughly in line with one a few days earlier that put her at 27 percent. Sanders is in the low 20s; Biden scored 8 percent in one survey and 9 percent in another. If two-thirds of Klobuchar supporters switch over to Biden, the former vice president could win the state.
In most of the Super Tuesday states, Klobuchar comes in around four or five percent in the most recent polls — nothing to get that excited about. But surveys indicate Buttigieg has roughly double her support in most of these states. If the Klobuchar and Buttigieg voters en masse decide to vote for Biden, suddenly Biden’s numbers are going to jump all over the place.
For example, Klobuchar looks like she has less than 5 percentage points worth of support in California. But Buttigieg is around 8 to 10 percent — and that 13 percent or so would not only ensure that Biden gets over the 15 percent threshold, it would put him in the mid-to-high 20s — a very respectable finish, and one much closer than anyone would have expected a few days ago.
Klobuchar is only at 4 percent in Texas. If you put her support and Buttigieg’s support together, you get 9 percent, and Biden sure as heck would prefer to have that in his column than in Sanders’s.
It’s a similar story in North Carolina: She’s only at 4 percent, but if you add that to Buttigieg’s 8 percentage points, you’re up to 12 percentage points. In the most recent poll in Colorado, 12 percent preferred Buttigieg and 6 percent preferred Klobuchar. In the most recent poll in Massachusetts, 12 percent preferred Buttigieg and 5 percent preferred Klobuchar. In Virginia, 8 percent wanted Buttigieg and 5 percent wanted Klobuchar.
Neither Klobuchar nor Buttigieg can guarantee that a majority of their supporters will jump onto the Biden bandwagon. But by making these endorsements on the eve of Super Tuesday, they’re probably going to have a much bigger impact on tomorrow’s winners than if they had stayed in the race.