By John McCormack
Monday, March 02, 2020
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.
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