A6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAy, MARCH 2 , 2020
Buttigieg’s withdrawal now
makes it possible that Biden and
Bloomberg, and possibly Warren,
will hit the 1 5 percent threshold in
more districts than they would
have with him as an active candi-
date. Buttigieg will still be on the
ballots Tuesday, and in states with
early voting, some people have
probably voted for him.
“If B ernie ends up in a situation
where he can run up a large
enough margin where there is
only one other candidate hitting
that threshold, that’s a big victory
for h im,” said A ce Smith, a Califor-
nia-based strategist who was a
senior adviser in the presidential
campaign of Sen. Kamala D. Har-
ris (D-Calif.). “If he has two or
three people, that’s not so good
because it will profoundly affect
the d elegates.”
At this point, campaigns are
focused on districts more than
states, hoping to maximize their
delegate counts by putting higher
priority on districts whose demo-
graphics appear more f avorable —
for Biden, that means districts
with higher concentrations of Af-
rican Americans — or that have
substantially more delegates to
award than average. All the cam-
paigns are focused as well on dis-
tricts with an odd rather t han even
number o f delegates to award.
one big advantage for Sanders
is the role California will play on
Tuesday. He lost the state to Clin-
ton in 2016, but he currently is the
leader in the polls there and, ac-
cording to Democrats not associ-
ated with campaigns, has a deeper
organization than any other can-
didate.
California offers early voting
and vote-by-mail to everyone and,
as of Thursday, nearly 3 million
people had returned their ballots.
more early ballots are being re-
turned, according to Paul mitch-
ell, a California strategist who
tracks the numbers. But percent-
ages tell the o ther part of the s tory,
which is that republicans are re-
turning their ballots more rapidly
than are Democrats.
Two Democrats said that on the
basis of their analysis and report-
ing, more people than ever are
waiting possibly until Election
Day to return those ballots and
hoping they have a better sense of
the s hape of the race by then.
republicans are behaving as
they have in past elections, turn-
ing in ballots at the same rate, but
Democrats are lagging. “A nybody
who’s waiting is not for Bernie
Sanders, and they’re trying des-
perately to make their v ote c ount,”
said Gale Kaufman, a Sacramento-
based s trategist.
The other reality about Super
Tuesday is that the results will not
be known immediately. Counting
in California will c ontinue into t he
following week, and with so many
candidates on the edge of viability,
the final numbers could look dif-
ferent than they a ppear on t he day
after voting.
[email protected]groups throughout her campaign.
Warren’s super PAC spending,
roughly $15 million, is of concern
to the Sanders campaign because
of her potential to attract voters
who otherwise might support
him.
Bloomberg is counting on the
massive amount of advertising he
has done to h elp b oost his chances.
According to Advertising Analyt-
ics, as of the beginning of last
week, he had spent about
$160 million on television ads in
the Super Tuesday states and was
at that point scheduled to spend
about $35 m illion more in t he final
week. But he has been slowed by a
poor debate performance in Ne-
vada and attacks on his record
since then.
Contrast that with Biden, who
at the beginning of last week had
spent nothing on television ads in
the Super Tuesday states and, ac-
cording to his campaign, will in-
vest about $2 million in radio and
TV ahead of Tuesday’s voting. In-
stead, Biden is counting heavily on
a boost from South Carolina and
support from African American
votes there and elsewhere.
Sanders, according to the Ad-
vertising Analytics figures, will
come in around $14 million to
$15 million in TV, and his cam-
paign has targeted the money to
have the maximum impact on
competitive districts. But he has
organizations that appear to
eclipse those of any of the other
candidates, and his team has
sought to use rallies in states with
early voting to encourage s upport-
ers to go directly to the polls to
bank votes ahead of Tuesday.
Super Tuesday has been a fix-
ture of Democratic nominating
contests since 1 988, the brainchild
of southern Democrats seeking
greater influence with the hope
that it would boost moderate can-
didates. That didn’t work out as
they had hoped, b ut the c oncept o f
a big day of primaries in early
march stuck.
By 2008, Super Tuesday had
grown to more than 20 states,
including California, Illinois, New
York and New Jersey. It became
known as “Super Duper Tuesday”
or “Tsunami Tuesday.” That year
saw Barack obama and Hillary
Clinton battle for an advantage,
and one victory of the obama
campaign was to shift the media’s
focus from who was winning big
states to the trench warfare of
delegate accumulation.
This year, almost the entire fo-
cus of Super Tuesday will be on
delegates. The landscape this year
is smaller than in 2008, but it still
sprawls across 14 states with votes
also in American Samoa and
among Democrats abroad. The
14 states include 164 congressio-are plunged into the biggest and
most important day of the Demo-
cratic nominating campaign.
By the time the votes f rom Tues-
day’s contests are counted, and all
the delegates allocated, at least
two things should become clearer.
one is whether Sanders has
emerged with an insurmountable
lead in the delegate race. The oth-
er, if Sanders’s delegate lead is not
so big, is whether Biden or some-
one else might be positioned to
overtake him.
Sanders heads toward Super
Tuesday’s contests in an enviable
position. But given growing resis-
tance to his candidacy among es-
tablishment Democrats, he needs
a strong performance Tuesday to
put a lock on becoming the dele-
gate leader heading to the nation-
al convention in milwaukee in
July.
“Bernie is the clear front-run-
ner, but he’s g ot t o get a lead, and a
substantial lead, to c onsolidate his
position,” said Ta d Devine, who
worked for Sanders’s campaign in
2016 and who advised Andrew
Yang this y ear.
No day on this year’s primary-
caucus calendar sets up any better
for Sanders than this year’s Super
Tuesday. one reason is his per-
ceived strength in California,
where 415 delegates will be dis-
tributed. o ther factors include t he
higher percentage o f Latino voters
in some of the Super Tuesday
states, particularly Texas with its
228 d elegates. Beyond that, p rima-
ries in t he future are m ostly closed,
denying Sanders the votes of inde-
pendents, one of his best constitu-
encies.
Campaign strategists can’t say
just how well Sanders will b e posi-
tioned after Super Tuesday. There
are simply too many variables —
too many candidates, too much
fluidity and too many combina-
tions about possible outcomes.
Campaigns have been modeling
the s tates and constantly tweaking
internal p rojections. As o ne s trate-
gist put it: “It’s an insane rubik’s
cube.”
Campaign advisers to both
Biden and former New York mayor
mike Bloomberg say they will be
best positioned to become the
principal alternative to Sanders
after Super Tuesday. Both could
benefit from the surprise decision
Sunday by former South Bend,
Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg to quit
the race.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-
minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-
mass.) appear to have even higher
hurdles than the others to score
well Tuesday. Warren has turned
to a super PAC f or advertising help
after decrying the use of such
electIon from A
For Sanders’s rivals, little
time left to blunt his ascent
election 2020
Nevada. In Iowa and New Hamp-
shire, he got about a quarter o f the
popular vote. But he is benefiting
from the fact that no other candi-
date has consistently broken
through the 15 percent threshold
statewide and in congressional
districts.
“There is a lot of difference be-
tween 34 percent of the delegates
versus 4 7 percent of the delegates,”
said Daron Shaw, a professor of
government at the University of
Te xas at Austin. “If he’s in the low
30s, I think i t’s a different s tory.”
Heading into Tuesday, the frac-
tured opposition gives Sanders a
potentially significant advantage.
The senator from Vermont is the
only candidate who is broadly via-
ble across all the states and dis-
tricts, m eaning he is likely to b reak
the threshold in almost every con-
gressional or state Senate district.
The other c andidates are i n a more
tenuous position, hovering in
polls s omewhere just b elow or j ust
above the 15 percent threshold
that determines viability for dele-
gates.
No one can predict with any
certainty how any of the others
will do in the district-by-district
competition, but their individual
and collective results will shape
both their and Sanders’s delegate
hauls.
The rules stipulate that a ny c an-
didate who gets 15 percent or more
in a district, or statewide, receives
a delegate. If Sanders a nd only o ne
other candidate hit 15 percent or
more and the others fall below
that, they would split the dele-
gates, although not necessarily
evenly. But if four candidates hit
the threshold in a district with
four delegates, everyone gets one
delegate, meaning even if Sanders
is the leader, his total would be
held down.cent overall. But these are merely
possible scenarios, not predic-
tions, and were all based on infor-
mation before South Carolina vot-
ed.
faiz Shakir, Sanders’s cam-
paign manager, sought to play
down suggestions that Sanders
will come out of Super Tuesday
with a lead of more than 300,
saying of the lower-end projec-
tions: “ If you g ave it to me, I’d take
it.” He said Super Tuesday could
provide additional momentum
that would put Sanders in a stron-
ger position for contests later in
march and in April.
Sanders has long criticized the
Democratic National Committee
for what he saw as the establish-
ment helping Clinton and hinder-
ing him in the 2016 campaign.
To day, ironically, he stands to ben-
efit, potentially significantly, from
the r ules t hat determine the d istri-
bution of delegates.
Nevada’s feb. 22 caucuses offer
an example of how Sanders is
benefiting. S anders got about o ne-
third of the raw vote in Nevada.
After realignment, the process by
which people w hose candidate has
not hit the 15 percent threshold
move to support another candi-
date, his county convention dele-
gate number hit about 47 percent.
Ultimately, he was awarded 24 of
the 36 delegates to the national
convention, which means from
one-third o f the initial raw vote, he
was able to pick up two-thirds of
the n ational convention delegates.
The caucuses provide an ex-
treme case of this kind of alloca-
tion, but the overall rules could
work similarly in Sanders’s favor
by giving him a share of the dele-
gates disproportionate to his raw
vote percentages. So far, the high-
est percentage of the vote he has
received in any contest was innal or state Senate districts that
will award the majority of dele-
gates. In all, 1,357 pledged dele-
gates — 34 percent of the total for
the y ear — w ill b e awarded.
Two factors make this year’s
event different from those in the
past. one is that Super Tuesday
falls just three days after the South
Carolina primary, rather than
10 days as it was in 2008. That
gives candidates little time for se-
rious campaigning in most of the
states and raises the question of
how much impact Biden’s victory
in South Carolina will have on
voters elsewhere. The other d iffer-
ence is that the field of candidates
competing Tuesday is larger than
on previous Super Tuesdays, even
with Buttigieg’s w ithdrawal.
Estimates of delegate totals and
of Sanders’s possible margins v ary
significantly. At the high end, say
strategists inside the campaigns
as well as outside analysts, Sand-
ers could emerge from Tuesday’s
contests leading his closest com-
petitor by 300 to as high as
40 0 delegates. That w ould put h im
firmly in command of the race
though still might leave him short
of a majority going into the con-
vention.
At the lower end of estimates,
the consensus is that Sanders’s
delegate margin could be in the
range of 200 or 250. That would
still give Sanders the advantage
but could be a more manageable
margin to overcome for one of the
other candidates, but only if the
field quickly shrinks after Tuesday.
one n on-campaign analysis cal-
culates that Sanders could win
between 6 00 and 7 00 delegates on
Tuesday with the next-highest
candidate in the range of 300 to- Sanders could emerge with a
2-to-1 lead over his closest chal-
lenger, but still well below 50 per-
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, leave a campaign rally in San Jose on Sunday. california,
whose primary is tuesday, is a delegate-rich prize for a presidential hopeful.BY CHELSEA JANES
AND AMY B WANGPete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old
former mayor of South Bend, Ind.,
who saw a meteoric rise from virtu-
al unknown to top-tier contender
and became the first openly gay
candidate to make a high-profile
presidential run, ended his cam-
paign Sunday as he confronted the
reality that his prospects of victory
had all but collapsed.
Buttigieg’s decision came short-
ly before Super Tuesday, the big-
gest primary day of the year, at a
time when the Democratic race
shows signs of becoming a race
between Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) and former vice president
Joe Biden, with Biden occupying a
centrist position that Buttigieg had
hoped to make his own.
Buttigieg struggled to win sup-
port from black voters, a key pillar
of the Democratic coalition and a
vulnerability that was emphasized
Saturday in South Carolina, where
he finished fourth.
The normally stoic Buttigieg ap-
peared to be steadying himself
throughout his farewell remarks in
his hometown of South Bend,
bringing to an end what was for a
time an electrifying candidacy. “Af-
ter a year of going everywhere,
meeting everyone, defying every
expectation, seeking every vote,
the truth is that the path has nar-
rowed to a close for our candidacy,
if not for our cause,” B uttigieg said.
He also referred to the pioneer-
ing nature of his run, saying, “We
sent a message to every kid out
there wondering if whatever
marks them out as different means
they are somehow destined to be
less than. [They saw] that someone
who once felt that exact same way
can become a leading American
presidential candidate — with his
husband at h is side.”
Buttigieg’s departure may help
add some clarity to a Democratic
presidential field that at one point
included more than two dozen can-
didates, including an array o f sena-
tors and governors, but has dwin-
dled to just a handful.
At first it seemed Buttigiegmight be one of the survivors, as he
won the Iowa caucuses and came
in second in New Hampshire. But
despite attracting enormous atten-
tion, significant support and often
enthusiastic crowds, Buttigieg was
not polling well in the upcoming
primary states and never found a
way to reverse the antipathy he
generated in the black community.
An aide to Buttigieg’s campaign
said Buttigieg and his advisers
looked at their models after South
Carolina results came in, and they
discovered their path had nar-rowed.
“Essentially the reason he is sus-
pending his campaign is the reason
he started the campaign: His goal
is to defeat the president and bring
a new kind of politics to our coun-
try,” a Buttigieg aide said. “He
thought his candidacy would be
best vehicle to do that. And when it
became clear his candidacy was
not the most viable vehicle to do
that, he stepped aside to make sure
[Democrats] could still achieve
those things.”
Buttigieg called Biden shortlyafter news of his departure broke,
according to two Biden aides who
said the candidates exchanged
voice mails but had yet to connect.
Buttigieg’s exit leaves several
unanswered questions, chief
among them whether he will en-
dorse Biden or any of the other
remaining contenders, and wheth-
er his staffers will shift over to
another campaign. It also leaves
unanswered the question of Butt-
igieg’s o wn future.
Buttigieg made history by be-
coming the first openly gay candi-
date to earn delegates for the presi-
dential nomination in a major po-
litical party. He also broke barriers
by making his marriage to his hus-
band, Chasten, a major part of his
campaign.
Chasten normally joins his hus-
band onstage after rallies, but Sat-
urday night, the Buttigiegs lin-
gered in a noticeably longer hug
than usual — a rare sign of the
emotional toll the campaign was
taking on Pete Buttigieg, who knew
then the end was near.
Chasten was also the first on-
stage at Buttigieg’s South Bend
event Sunday, and he delivered an
emotional introduction in which
he told the crowd his husband had
helped him believe in himself
again, and that he urged him to run
for president because “I knew
there were other kids in this coun-
try who needed to believe in them-
selves, too.”
Ye t Buttigieg did not make the
trailblazing nature of his campaign
central to his pitch, and it often got
lost in the realities of day-to-day
campaigning. Not until Buttigieg
won the Iowa caucuses did inter-
viewers begin asking him more
directly about America’s readiness
for a gay president and what his
candidacy might mean to gay
Americans.
Nevertheless, with an aggres-
sive, no-holds-barred media expo-sure strategy, Buttigieg managed
to rise in the public consciousness
over 2019 and soon began raising
more money and polling higher
than many of his opponents who
were governors or sitting members
of Congress. Buttigieg’s o bvious in-
telligence and eloquence excited
many Democratic voters looking
for a powerful counter-force to
President Trump.
He promised to usher in “gener-
ational change” t o the White House
and deliberately avoided releasing
detailed plans at first, though he
spoke of big ideas like abolishing
the electoral college and restruc-
turing the Supreme Court.
Along the way, his use of South
Bend as the backbone of his experi-
ence was both a boon to his candi-
dacy and also a threat to undo his
campaign at times. After a white
police officer shot a black South
Bend resident in June, Buttigieg
was widely criticized for his han-
dling of the matter — as well as his
general relationship with the
South Bend Police Department
and the city’s minority residents.
The shooting set off weeks of pro-
tests, briefly taking Buttigieg off
the campaign trail.
Still, his profile continued to
rise, and by last fall, Buttigieg had
shifted to a more moderate lane as
he tried to seize a middle ground
between Biden and Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-mass.).
“The way we think this shapes
up is, if you want the most ideologi-
cal, far-out candidate possible,
you’ve got your answer. You want
the most Washington candidate
possible, you’ve got your answer,”
Buttigieg said in November. “Ev-
erybody else, I think, can come our
way. I think that’s almost every-
body.”
The crowd interrupted him
with a new chant: “2024! 2024!”
[email protected]
[email protected]Pete Buttigieg ends his history-making presidential bid
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
An event for former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg is dismantled in Dallas on Sunday after he
ended his presidential campaign.First openly gay hopeful
rose to top-tier contender
but saw prospects fade