🚨📊 Super Tuesday Preview
And then there were four... (and Tulsi)
Hello! Happy Super Tuesday and welcome to a very exciting edition of Inside The Newsroom. Well, what a 48 hours that was... On Sunday night, Pete Buttigieg announced he’d be dropping out of the race, with Amy Klobuchar’s announcing just 24 hours later, and both immediately endorsed Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Dallas Monday night. The suspensions were the biggest twist to the race so far and could have gigantic implications on whether Bernie Sanders gets that all important majority of delegates heading into the convention. On paper, a majority looks a whole lot less likely now that Biden has consolidated much of the moderate lane, with seemingly only Michael Bloomberg standing in his way to his own majority. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is digging in its heels, while simultaneously continuing on life support as the race shrinks around her. And then there’s Tulsi Gabbard who’s… still here! Right let’s get to the numbers!!
Here Comes Biden?
Wow, talk about comebacks. The Biden campaign seemed dead after Nevada and might have been a South Carolina primary loss away from dropping out, but just two days later he seems to be as strong as he was back in the summer when he was polling at 35 percent. Because of the speed with which Pete and Amy dropped out, we have limited updated polls, but a Morning Consult national poll from Sunday showed Biden with 26 percent support, three points behind Bernie, and a 10-point swing from South Carolina. But that was before Pete and Amy dropped out, and you’ve got to think that Biden could end up back around 35 percent, once the other moderates’ voters realign themselves.
As for the Super Tuesday states, it might be too late for Biden’s momentum to really count. Biden’s romp through South Carolina won’t have given him enough time to flood the airwaves with ads, especially in California and Texas, the two most important states with 415 and 228 delegates, respectively. Comparatively, Bloomberg had spent just short of $50 million in California alone before the weekend, while Bernie had spent more than $5 million. Meanwhile, Biden reportedly had spent just $4,000 in the Golden State, a trend that stretches across most of the other 13 states.
Bernie’s Time to Shine
The past 72 hours couldn’t have gone worse for the Sanders campaign. Saturday night saw Bernie finish second in South Carolina with 20 percent of the vote, six points less than in 2016. Then the moderates gathered around Biden on a stage in Dallas, including Beto O’Rourke, who was the darling of the progressive movement less than two years ago. And we can’t overlook the impact of events in the last 48 hours. Before Saturday’s primary, FiveThirtyEight projected Sanders to have about a 40 percent chance of securing the majority of delegates, but that figure’s plunged to 16 percent, leaving Bernie about 400 short of the all-important 1,911 figure. Not only that, but Biden’s overtaken him with a 21 percent chance of securing that majority. But the gloomiest number of all is the 63 percent chance no candidate secures a majority, meaning the DNC’s superdelegates will decide the party’s fate in Milwaukee in July.
There’s still plenty of reason for optimism and realistic hope for the Sanders campaign, who won’t be panicking too much just yet. They know they’re really only performing poorly with one specific demographic, older African American voters, and are leading pretty much everywhere else across the country. Fortunately for them, today’s states with the largest percentage of American American voters — Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas — are in the lower half of states for total delegates. And among the seven states with the most delegates up for grabs voting today, Bernie’s currently leading in five of them — California, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Colorado.
Bloomberg’s ‘In It To Win It’
The latest developments will likely spell the end of a potential Bloomberg nomination, though don’t expect Mike to drop out any time soon, if at all. In response to Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out and calls for him to drop out as well, Bloomberg said he’s “in it to win it” and that Pete and Amy “behaved themselves”, which just goes to show what kind of man Bloomberg is, and the thinking of the DNC. To be fair to Mike, his $65 billion fortune means he can’t be bought or pressured into dropping out, which is less than can be said about his well-behaved children. Despite ploughing more than $500 million on TV ads so far, Bloomberg has little to show for his efforts. He’s not set to win any of the 14 states, and will do well just to finish over the 15 percent threshold in most of them. The best-case scenario could be a string of second-place finishes, leaving him with considerable leverage heading deeper into the race and eventually into Milwaukee. At least he still has his Republican supporter base though…
What Is Warren’s Plan?
Warren currently stands close to a zero percent chance of winning a majority of delegates, and is set to win less than 300 when it’s all said and done. So what’s Liz still doing in the race? Well, if it wasn’t apparent on the debate stage in Nevada when Warren said she’ll let the process play out, her plan was made crystal clear by her campaign manager Roger Lau Sunday night. Lau wrote on Medium that the campaign now accepts that there’ll likely be no majority winner heading into the convention, writing “the convention in Milwaukee is the final play” in Warren’s attempt to be president. But it’s hard to believe that the DNC will rally around her if Biden is within touching distance of Bernie, so that rings hollow from the Warren campaign. Instead, another scenario could be possible…
As of right now, there’s still very much a realistic majority path for Bernie, as we discussed above. With Bloomberg and Biden set to cannabalize each other going forward, the establishment remain on tenterhooks over whether they’ve done enough to stop Bernie becoming the nominee. So let’s imagine if Biden and Bloomberg suddenly dropped out. Highly unlikely, but just let yourself imagine. We’d have a Sanders vs Warren showdown. There’s no way that the establishment would rally around Bernie, meaning everyone not associated with his campaign would join Warren, as the “lesser of two evils” (oh the irony). That would all but secure a majority for Warren, and stop Bernie, the only objective for the DNC at this point. Again, very unlikely, but it’s the only way I see Warren winning. What’s more certain is that Warren has lost, and will continue to lose, the backing of the progressive wing of the party in droves, so the most likely outcome for her will be political desolation. Warren’s U.S. Senate seat is up for election in November, so could she even be primaried from a progressive? It’s possible.