Joe Biden, for all intents and purposes, gets the two-person race he wanted.
With his unlikely romp across the Super Tuesday map, Joe Biden reshaped the 2020 Democratic primary — and got the two-person race against Bernie Sanders that seemed like a pipe dream a few days ago.
“I’ve never seen anybody mount a comeback like this — ever,” Matt Seyfang, an expert delegate counter who had worked for Pete Buttigieg, said of Biden’s unexpected rout.
Bernie Sanders claimed the biggest prize of the night, California, though with vote tallies still out, it was unclear how the delegate count there would shake out.
But in terms of the expectations game, it was undeniably Biden’s night, as he won at least nine of 14 states — including a shocker of a win in Texas and in Warren’s Massachusetts, where he never held a campaign event or opened a field office.
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The scale of his win was big geographically — running from the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to the West Texas plains — as well as demographically. Biden won black voters by huge margins, but also got more support from women than the only woman in the race. He scored in the suburbs and rural areas of the South and West. His major weaknesses were with young people and Latinos, with whom Sanders mopped up in California, Colorado and parts of Texas.
The sudden momentum driving Biden’s wave across the 14 states came after his decisive win in South Carolina, demonstrating he was the only moderate in a still-crowded field who appealed to African American voters. That led to quick exits by Pete Buttigieg then Amy Klobuchar, who along with Beto O’Rourke starred at a raucous, televised rally in Dallas.
With no ad budget to speak of and a shoestring organization, Biden put on a three-day exhibition of how to leverage pure momentum into a massive victory. He also showed that his abysmal showings in predominantly white Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t matter that much, after all.
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With his unlikely romp across the Super Tuesday map, Joe Biden reshaped the 2020 Democratic primary — and got the two-person race against Bernie Sanders that seemed like a pipe dream a few days agohttps://t.co/PxbKzc85Dp
— POLITICO (@politico) March 4, 2020
In my lifetime, I've never seen an election where late deciders have broken so sharply from early voters than this one.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020
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