Advantage Biden: 5 takeaways from Super Tuesday

Joe Biden capped one of the most head-spinning political turnarounds in memory, racking up a string of victories in Super Tuesday primaries to complete a three-day resurrection of his status as Democratic presidential front-runner.

In the biggest day on the primary calendar, the former U.S. vice-president's campaign gobbled up two-thirds of the states being contested Tuesday, in a duel for delegates against Sen. Bernie Sanders.

What a change from the weekend.

His campaign appeared on death's door before he won Saturday's South Carolina primary. Suddenly, rival candidates started dropping and moderate voters stampeded hisway in Tuesday's 14 contests.

This morning, Michael Bloombergwithdrew his candidacy. After a weak showing on Tuesday, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York announced he was leaving the raceandbacking Biden.

"They don't call it Super Tuesday for nothing," Biden said at a victory rally. "We were told that when it got to Super Tuesday it would be over.Well, it may be over for the other guy."

His deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, called it one of the greatest comebacks in American political history, and CNN political commentator Van Jones said people would be studying the night for decades to come.

The rival that Biden dismissed as "the other guy,"however, predicted his own eventual triumph.

Speaking in his home state of Vermont, Sanders said,"We are going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country."

Joe Bidens surge on Super Tuesday, Sanders strong in the West

5 years ago

Duration 3:45

Watch highlights that happened throughout the make-or-break night and analysis from political panellists. As of 4:20 a.m. ET, results in California and Maine had not yet been officially called.

By midday Wednesday,Biden had taken Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Minnesota, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Maine.

Sanders won Vermont, Coloradoand Utah, and was leading in California.

Here are fivetakeaways on the state of the race.

It's a two-person dogfight

It might take a while to sort out the exact delegate totals, with results still being tallied for those delegates awarded on a district-by-district basis.

But Biden and Sanders are now unquestionably the two contenders.

Biden dominated in most of the country. He triumphed in the north, theeast and the south, winning in unexpected places, like Minnesota and Massachusetts; he easily capturedthe delegate-rich states of Virginia and North Carolina; and pulledoff his biggest coup of the night in Texas.

Sanders won the southwest. He performed well in states with sizeable Latino populations Colorado andUtah,and he led throughout the night in the biggest prize of all, California.

Sanders's challenge gets steeper

But the map only gets harder for Sanders. The biggest states about to vote are overwhelmingly ones Sanderslost in the 2016 primaries.

While there are still two-thirds of 3,979 delegates yet to be allocated,only eight remaining states hold 100 delegates or more.

Sanders lost all but oneof those eight states against his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. Last time, he won Michigan, which votes next week.But he lost the other largestates, and most of them by a wide margin Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.

The good news for Sanders: He's shown an ability to win in places he lost four years ago. In the southwest, Sanders lost California and Nevada last time, but did much betterin 2020.

Party favours make the night

Democratic Party figures did something for Biden that Republicans did not do for establishment favourites like Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016: they cleared the field swiftly to stop an outside challenger.

Biden got a little help from many Democratic friends.

This sudden withdrawal earlier in the week by rivals Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg was a godsend in several ways.

Their departure made a huge mathematical difference, especially in California. It allowed Biden to reach the minimum threshold for getting delegates, in numerous district-level races. Candidates failing to get 15 per cent at the state level, or in any single congressional district, are assigned zero delegates.

Had the anti-Sanders vote remained splintered, Sanders might have conceivably been the only qualifying candidate in California, and galloped ahead with virtually its entire haul of delegates.

Endorsements helped Biden elsewhere.

In Minnesota, Klobuchar's sudden withdrawal and help on the ground helped Biden secure a stunning upset. He beat Sanders in a state Sanders carried by 23 points againstClinton in the 2016 primaries.

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Krystina White says black voters should keep issues in mind even as they support Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.

That burst of momentum helped Biden overcome organizational deficiencies: the former vice president's campaign was short on cash and had a limited presence in several of the states he won.

Exit polls showed a sudden burst of late-deciding voters who turned toward Biden.The rush of resignations and endorsements sent a signal to those voters that, if they opposed Sanders, Biden was their best option.

Bloombust

Bloomberg showered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own cash in a campaign that enriched advertisers and political staffers across the country.

He served food at rallies and ran expensive national ads that aired in places he wasn't even competing.

The result of this roughly half-billion in spending? American Samoa it's the oneplaceBloomberg won.

In a speech to supporters, he emphasized the broader achievement of having entered the race late, as an outside candidate, and picking up delegates in lots of different places.

But on Wednesday morning he acknowledged the inevitable. Bloomberg released a statement conceding he had no path to the nomination, before handing Bidenone more endorsement.

More importantly, he suggested he planned to devoteresources tohelp Biden win the presidency.

"I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life," Bloomberg said in a statement.

"I've always believed that defeating Donald Trump starts with uniting behind the candidate with the best shot to do it. ... It is clear that candidate is my friend and a great American, Joe Biden. ... I will work to make him the next president of the United States."

It's young vs. old

There's a generational divide tearing at the Democratic Party. The oldest voters were solidly pro-Biden, and the youngest were squarely pro-Sanders.

Sanders's main sales pitch has been that he would inspire youthto turn out in record numbers to defeat Trump.

But young people consistently vote at a far lower rate than older Americans.

Sanders won the under-30 age category by dozens of percentage points nationwide ranging from 13 percentage points in Alabamato nearly 50 per cent in Texas and Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Biden won the senior citizens' vote by 69 points in Alabama, 45 points in North Carolina and36 points in Texas, and the numbers were similar elsewhere.

In digesting these numbers Tuesday, several pundits pointed to a big challenge ahead for the Democratic Party: will it select a candidate capable of turning out both groups in November?

Sanders continued making the case that the key to victory is inspiring youth turnout. "You cannot beat Trump with the same-oldsame-old kind of politics," Sanderssaid.