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Nine states, one night, and a Democratic primary that suddenly looks like a two-man race.
Joe Biden walked into Super Tuesday clinging to a South Carolina bounce and walked out of it the front-runner. Across 14 states and American Samoa, over a third of the Democratic Party’s pledged delegates were up for grabs on the single biggest voting day of the primary calendar, and by the early hours of March 4, Biden had turned a race Bernie Sanders was supposed to be running away with into a genuine two-person contest.
- Biden was projected to win at least nine to ten states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Maine, plus upset wins over Sanders in Texas and over Elizabeth Warren in her home state of Massachusetts.
- Sanders took the night’s biggest single prize, California, along with Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont, keeping the delegate math tight.
- Mike Bloomberg, who spent more than $500 million of his own money and over $230 million on Super Tuesday advertising alone, won only American Samoa and suspended his campaign the morning of March 4, endorsing Biden.
Biden’s Comeback Takes Shape
Three days after South Carolina, Biden went into Tuesday night with a skeleton operation in several states — minimal advertising, few field offices, and a campaign that had been written off after weak finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. It didn’t matter. Late-breaking endorsements from Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke consolidated moderate support behind him in the final 48 hours, and voters in states he barely visited turned out anyway.
Speaking to a jubilant crowd at a rally in Los Angeles, Biden captured the mood of his own campaign in real time.
“It’s a good night and it seems to be getting even better… They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing.”
The wins in Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama came early and set the tone, with Biden again showing the coalition that carried him in South Carolina — Black voters, suburbanites and white working-class Democrats. Taking Texas away from Sanders and Massachusetts away from Warren, in her own backyard, were the two results that changed the shape of the night.
Sanders Holds California, But Loses the Narrative
Sanders still had the best single night of anyone not named Biden — California alone carries a massive delegate haul, and adding Colorado, Utah and Vermont kept him within range in the overall delegate count. But heading into Tuesday as the national front-runner and coming out of it fighting for a share of headlines against a candidate many had left for dead a week earlier was not the script his campaign wanted.
Bloomberg’s Half-Billion-Dollar Bet Fails
No campaign’s Tuesday collapse was more total than Mike Bloomberg’s. Skipping Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina entirely, the billionaire former New York City mayor bet everything on Super Tuesday, pouring over $500 million of his own fortune into the race and more than $230 million into ads in the states voting that day. He won American Samoa. By Wednesday morning he had suspended his campaign and thrown his endorsement to Biden, instantly narrowing the field further.
A Race Democrats Didn’t Expect
Warren’s poor showing in her home state has fueled speculation she won’t stay in the race much longer, while the exits of Bloomberg and, before him, Klobuchar and Buttigieg, have turned what looked like a crowded, chaotic primary into a Biden-Sanders fight. The consolidation behind Biden that party leaders had been pushing for weeks finally happened in the space of about 72 hours.
Both campaigns now turn to the next round of contests with a real delegate fight in front of them, and Biden’s team is already framing the days ahead around the platform he wants to run on against Trump in the fall. Sanders isn’t going anywhere either — California’s haul alone guarantees he stays competitive on delegates deep into March, which means the next several primary nights are going to matter just as much as this one did.
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