It’s hard to remember an Election Day with so much uncertainty as voters go to the polls.
And yet Joe Biden’s blowout win in South Carolina on Saturday — and subsequent steps toward consolidating the Democratic Party’s moderate wing — may have already answered many of the biggest questions about Super Tuesday and the race that follows.
A week or two ago, opinion polls showed a clear national picture: Bernie Sanders had built a commanding lead over Mr. Biden, whose numbers had fallen back into the teens at the head of a crowded pack of moderate candidates. But this left the outcome of Super Tuesday extremely murky, with Mr. Sanders teetering at the edge of either claiming an all but insurmountable lead over a deeply fractured moderate wing of the party, or being forced into a long battle culminating at the convention in Milwaukee in July.
Two such divergent outcomes both looked possible because almost all of the states on Super Tuesday were either very good for Mr. Sanders or pretty bad for him.
With a wide national lead, he had fought into a tight race or even taken a lead in his worst states. Most of these states are in the South, but they also include Minnesota and Massachusetts, where he faced home-state rivals. A Sanders sweep was in reach, which would deny any of his rivals a chance to emerge as a strong challenger. Yet even at the apex of the Sanders advantage, his opponents were still within striking distance of prevailing in a majority of states, an outcome that would all but assure a protracted fight for the nomination.
At the same time, Mr. Sanders found himself in such a commanding position in his best states that he had a very real chance to claim an insurmountable delegate lead. This possibility rested on two things: the party’s 15 percent threshold for earning delegates, and his enormous support in California, the nation’s largest delegate prize. The pre-South Carolina polls showed three other candidates within striking distance of 15 percent, but none assured of doing so. If they fell short, it would be hard to see how Mr. Sanders could be stopped.
Of course, the possibility of a Sanders sweep will remain until the votes are counted. But the events of the last few days mean that many of the old questions now have fairly clear answers.
Mr. Biden is now a favorite across most of the South. He’s also clearly favored to reach the 15 percent threshold in California. His potential gains in the West are somewhat limited by the number of ballots cast in advance there, perhaps especially in Colorado, but persuadable voters tend to vote later.
And the departures of Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg don’t help just Mr. Biden; they might also help Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg cross the 15 percent threshold in California and in other states where Mr. Sanders is a heavy favorite, like Colorado and Utah.
Taken together, it is now obvious that a strong opponent to Mr. Sanders has emerged, and it is much harder to see Mr. Sanders claiming an insurmountable delegate lead on Super Tuesday. If so, the big question of one week ago has been answered: The suspense will go on after Super Tuesday.
Of course, broader uncertainty about the state of the race remains. The new question is: Just how far can Mr. Biden surge? The fragmentary and not always high-quality post-South Carolina polling data certainly shows Mr. Biden making big gains, whether nationwide or in Virginia.
But it remains to be seen whether those gains will be enough for him to pull off a symbolically important win outside the several Southern states where he’s favored — most likely in Texas, but perhaps in Maine or, less likely, Minnesota or Massachusetts. To accomplish this, Mr. Biden would probably have to pry away support from Mr. Bloomberg, the one other moderate who remains in the race.
Super Tuesday is the first test of Mr. Bloomberg’s support. State polls suggested he was positioned to reach 15 percent in many Southern contests heading into South Carolina. This would cost Mr. Sanders delegates, and therefore keep him farther from the majority of delegates necessary to win without a contested convention. Yet at the same time, if Mr. Bloomberg’s strength is confined to the South, where Mr. Biden is now poised to do well, Mr. Bloomberg could cost Mr. Biden more delegates than he costs Mr. Sanders.
Recent polls of likely Democratic voters in Super Tuesday states give reason to think Mr. Bloomberg’s voters could break for Mr. Biden. Some of those polls, taken by the survey research company Dynata in collaboration with The Times, and matched to voter file data from L2, suggest that Mr. Bloomberg held nearly three times as much support among voters over age 65, a group skeptical of Mr. Sanders, than voters under 34.
In the open primaries across the South, Mr. Bloomberg had 29 percent support among voters who last participated in a Republican primary, suggesting he was positioned to fare well among the sort of college-educated, affluent voters who flipped from Mitt Romney in 2012 to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and powered the Democratic surge across the Sun Belt.
The few post-South Carolina polls do not necessarily show a collapse in Mr. Bloomberg’s support. If it falters, Mr. Biden could be favored to win in Texas. The extent of advanced voting elsewhere makes it harder to imagine a big Biden upset, but Maine, with one of the oldest Democratic electorates in the country, could surprise.
Another question concerns Ms. Warren, who could easily breach 15 percent of the vote in many Northern states, especially with the help of a few former supporters of Mr. Buttigieg or Ms. Klobuchar. She could also win her home state, Massachusetts. It is hard to see where she could take her campaign from there, but if she could pull off 15 percent in California, it would probably be just be enough to block Mr. Sanders from claiming a majority of delegates on Super Tuesday.
"some" - Google News
March 03, 2020 at 08:21PM
https://ift.tt/3ckO71Y
Some Questions Already Seem Answered About Super Tuesday - The New York Times
"some" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37fuoxP
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Some Questions Already Seem Answered About Super Tuesday - The New York Times"
Post a Comment