In preparation for a big Super Tuesday night, you should probably review Daily Kos Elections’ preview. Keep in mind, though, that David Jarman mades those excellent projections prior to seeing the latest polls from Data for Progress which are very bullish on Biden’s Joementum.
To see why Sanders could be headed for a tough night, I am going to pair up those polls and Jarman’s analysis with the timeline for poll closings.
The first results we should see today will ironically come from the furthest west time zone. American Samoa will begin its caucus at 3pm eastern and we’ll probably get the results not too long after that. No one has polled Samoans, so there’s not much to go on. Traditionally, the caucus system has favored Sanders, and he might get an early win here. It would be helpful because things could take a bad turn for him at the beginning of the night.
The first polls to close are in Vermont and Virginia at 7pm. Sanders is looking very, very strong in his home state and he’ll be declared the winner there immediately. However, if this is paired with a fifteen point win for Biden in Virginia, the former vice-president will be off to the better start. As for the delegate count, much will depend on whether anyone other than Sanders reaches 15 percent in Vermont. This is where having Klobuchar and Buttigieg drop out and endorse Biden could yield its first dividend. If Bernie carries all 16 votes there it could match or exceed any deficit he gets from Virginia’s 99 delegates. If Bernie has to share some of Vermont’s delegates, he’ll be behind in the most important metric of the night.
At 7:30, the polls close in North Carolina. If Biden is really ahead by nine, they might be able to call this race fairly quickly, and Biden will be up two states to one, and certainly in the delegate lead.
At 8pm, there are six poll closings: Maine, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and (most of) Texas. If Data for Progress has these races pegged correctly, the first thing we’ll see is an announcement that Biden is the winner in Alabama and Sanders is the winner in Maine (the tweet doesn’t include Maine, but Sanders leads Biden there 34-25). Again, this works more favorably for Biden because Alabama has more than twice as many delegates as Maine, and Biden is poised to win there by 25 points.
It will probably be a while before the other states are called. Texas won’t be fully finished until 9pm and, like Massachusetts, it looks like a nail biter in any case. Biden’s lead in Tennessee and Oklahoma is only seven points so they may get the “Too Early to Call” designation.
At this point, Sanders could be looking at having won only Vermont and Maine, possibly by disappointing margins that don’t yield him as many delegates as he had hoped. Warren could be in holding a narrow lead on him Massachusetts, and Biden could already be the declared winner in North Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama, with clear leads in Tennessee and Oklahoma.
That’s not going to be a good look. And it won’t get better if the polls close in Texas and Sanders isn’t immediately declared the winner. He’s been favored there, but Data for Progress sees him losing. On the other hand, 9pm should bring him some good news when he is announced as the winner in Colorado. In Minnesota, he should be showing in first place even if he isn’t immediately awarded the win.
The tide will continue to turn his way after 10pm when the results from Utah begin to come in. However, if he’s really only leading there by 6 percent, that race won’t be called right away and it could be perceived as another disappointment.
Finally, at 11pm, the polls will close in California. Most likely, Sanders will be declared the immediate winner, but it will be weeks before the counting is done and people know how the delegates will be split. This means that the night’s most consequential contest will play little role in how the overall results from Super Tuesday are perceived.
I don’t think Biden can realistically hope for a better result than this, and it’s probably too much to ask. I think these Data for Progress polls are very pessimistic about Sanders performance, and I’ll be surprised if they’re accurate. For one thing, some of Biden’s late momentum should be blunted by a poorer performance in the early voting.
It’s conceivable that Sanders will win many of the states that are in Biden’s column above.
Obviously, we’ll also want to see how Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren are doing and how frequently they’re reaching the fifteen percent threshold for delegates. Data for Progress thinks Bloomberg will reach viability in every state excepting Vermont. David Jarman gives Bloomberg the best chance at getting a win in Oklahoma, with Arkansas having some potential for him as well. Data for Progress has Warren winning her home state and at the 15 percent mark in every state except Alabama and North Carolina. That would be a great night for her, although she’d still have no hope of winning the nomination outright.
If it’s going to be a great night for Sanders, we should know pretty quickly. If he’s leading in Virginia, he’s probably going to win almost everywhere.
I’ll see you at 7pm and we can watch the first results come in together.
Those numbers are great for Biden…but they include polling from before Buttigieg, Klobuchar and O’Rourke endorsed him. How much did they weight any movement in Biden’s direction?
I don’t know that they weighted it in anyone’s direction. The weights would normally be to get a better model of the turnout than was produced by their pool of respondents alone.
Biden did better than this…no offense. I certainly didn’t see Massachusetts and possibly Maine coming
Or Minnesota.
Or Texas, given that Sanders was supposed to have a lock on the Latinx communities.
Biden has done insanely well. I mean, I would have considered myself nuts to predict he’d do this well.
I wonder how much of this is “the Obama effect.” (Quit a lot, is my morning-after guess.)
By that I mean something like this: Biden hasn’t run a great, or even a very good, campaign. But he was Barack Obama’s unfailingly loyal and cheerful and competent vice-president for eight years. And despite the frustrations with Obama that are so visible online and among certain segments of the left wing of the Democratic coalition, he remains both the most successful Democratic politician in the lifetime of most Americans and overwhelmingly popular among Democratic voters.
And, for an electorate battered by 3+ years of Trump and faced with a superabundance of qualified candidates, that’s proven (at least, so far) to be enough, and to be decisive.
It actually has confused me why so many Democrats are happy with Obama overall, and yet don’t think Biden would be a good president. I expect Biden to govern much more like Obama than as the caricature of a Evan Bayh Democrat in which he is so often portrayed. That’s a product of looking at his long Senate record, I know, but shouldn’t the fact that all the money went to people like Buttigieg rather than Biden tell you something?