Former Vice-Preisident Joe Biden threw conventional wisdom out the window by storming to victory on Super Tuesday in a show of strength that seemed barely plausible 96 hours ago. Coming off a strong showing in South Carolina, it seemed like he would take some momentum into Super Tuesday when 14 states and territories went to the polls. But no one imagined that he would dominate the map by winning 9 (and possibly 10 after Maine) out of the 14 states on offer.
Conventional wisdom said he would win the South. What it didn’t say was that he would win over 60% of the black vote in North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama. What it didn’t say was that his margin of victory on those states would be 19, 30 and a barely believable 46 points respectively. What it didn’t say was that he’d win Texas with over a third of votes.
On the most astonishing of nights Biden would go on to win states that he didn’t even campaign in and had no field offices in. It wasn’t a surge, it was a tsunami. The most surprising results of the night came from Massachusetts and Minnesota. Before Tuesday both states seemed like tossups with Bernie Sanders running neck and neck with Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar respectively. After Klobuchar dropped out of the race the day before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden he was still well behind Sanders in the polls, yet he somehow turned that around to win the state by 9 points.
Even more astonishing was that he took the momentum of his win in South Carolina through to Massachusetts where he never campaigned or spent ad money and turned that into a 6 point victory. Think about that for a second. He has consistently been third in the polls there behind the hugely popular Sanders and Warren who is in her home state. He decides not to visit or spend ad money there because he knows his chances are slim, and then ends up winning the state.
The big loser of the night was Sanders. After having built a grassroots campaign that looked like it would take a decisive lead in the delegate count after Super Tuesday his team will have to settle for second place and worse still a complete lack of momentum. After all the delegates are counted and distributed, he might end up close to Biden but that itself will be viewed as a loss by his team.
Tuesday was supposed to have been the day he separated from the pack and had the polling numbers, donors and support to match his ambitions but fell short at the final hurdle. The crucial losses in Minnesota and Massachusetts along with a poor showing in delegate rich North Carolina did not prove fatal for the Sanders campaign but it certainly looks like he will need to fight for every single vote and delegate moving forward.
The problem for Sanders is that he will be also be fighting the might of the Democratic party who have coalesced around Biden as the chosen candidate. Biden continues to get establishment endorsement after endorsement and is expected to raise huge amounts of money including from Super PACs in the next few weeks. This could very soon be an impossible mountain for Sanders to climb.
Embarrassingly for Sanders he did not even sweep his home state on Tuesday. In 2016 he won 86% of the vote in Vermont and took all the delegates with him, this year he only won 50% and shared the delegates with Biden. This may seem like a small point, what do the 16 delegates from Vermont really mean in the larger scheme of things when 4000 delegates are up for grabs. But one could say it points to a deeper vulnerability within the Sanders campaign. Sanders is still hugely popular with younger, liberal voters but is that enough?
