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Biden And Sanders Face Off In Six Key States In Next Round Of Primaries

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Six states, 352 delegates, and Bernie Sanders running out of runway.

Voters in Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and North Dakota head to the polls Tuesday in the first test of the Democratic race since it collapsed into a two-man contest. Joe Biden arrives riding a Super Tuesday surge and a fresh wave of endorsements; Bernie Sanders arrives needing to prove his 2016 Michigan magic wasn’t a one-time thing. With 352 pledged delegates up for grabs, the night could determine whether this remains a real contest or a formality.

• Biden enters the six-state night leading the delegate count 664 to 573 over Sanders.
• Michigan carries the biggest single prize of the night with 125 delegates, and it’s the state Sanders shocked Hillary Clinton in back in 2016.
• Washington’s 89 delegates stand as Sanders’s best remaining shot, while pre-election polling showed Biden with double-digit leads in both Michigan and Missouri.

The Six-State Math

Michigan’s 125 delegates dwarf everything else on the board, followed by Washington’s 89, Missouri’s 68 and Mississippi’s 36, with Idaho and North Dakota rounding out the smaller contests. That lopsided distribution is exactly why the night was being framed around one state: whoever wins Michigan walks away with the headline, regardless of what happens in Fargo or Boise.

Biden came into Tuesday with a 91-delegate cushion, built almost entirely off his Super Tuesday comeback a week earlier. Sanders needed more than a good night — he needed a big one, because a split decision does nothing to close a gap that size with the calendar working against him.

Michigan: The Rematch

Sanders’s 2016 win over Clinton in Michigan is the reason this state carries so much symbolic weight — it was the upset that kept his first campaign alive and proved he could reach working-class voters in the industrial Midwest. Pre-election polling ahead of the 2020 rematch, though, showed Biden with a double-digit lead in the state, a dramatic reversal from four years earlier.

Biden 664, Sanders 573 — and Michigan’s 125 delegates were about to decide how much that gap was going to matter.

A Biden win in Michigan wouldn’t just add to his delegate lead; it would gut the central argument of Sanders’s campaign — that he, not Biden, is the candidate who can hold the Rust Belt.

The Endorsement Wave Behind Biden

Biden’s Super Tuesday rebound was fueled by a rapid consolidation of the moderate lane. Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker all lined up behind him in the days before the vote, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — a rising figure in the party who has since made her own headlines over state executive actions — added her name to the list of battleground-state backers.

That kind of institutional consolidation is precisely what Biden’s campaign had been missing for most of the winter, and it showed up in the polling almost immediately, particularly in Mississippi, where Biden held a commanding lead among the state’s 36 delegates.

Sanders’s Narrowing Path

Analysts going into Tuesday were blunt about the math: if Biden swept the Midwestern and Southern contests on the board, Sanders’s route to the 1,991 delegates needed for the nomination would become exceedingly narrow. Washington’s 89 delegates, along with the smaller Western contests in Idaho and North Dakota, represented Sanders’s clearest remaining opportunities to keep pace.

That left Sanders needing something close to a clean sweep outside the South just to keep the delegate gap from widening further — a tall order against a candidate who’d just proven, a week earlier, that he could win practically everywhere at once.

Polls close across the six states through the evening, with Michigan’s results the ones both campaigns will be watching first. If Biden repeats his Super Tuesday performance in the state Sanders won by less than two points in 2016, there won’t be much left to argue about heading into the next round of contests.