Time March 16–23, 2020On The biggesT day Of vOTing in The 2020 demO-
cratic primary, Joe Biden’s presidential hopes came
roaring back to life. “They don’t call it Super Tuesday
for nothing!” Biden exulted as he rallied supporters in
Los Angeles on the evening of March 3, flanked by his
wife and sister. “People are talking about a revolution?
We started a movement!” It was a not-so-subtle jab at
Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-styled revolutionary
who looked like he was on his way to the nomination be-
fore everything turned topsy-turvy. The Super Tuesday
voting in 14 states, which awarded about one-third of
the total delegates in the Democratic primary, capped a
whirlwind few days that reordered the campaign and cat-
apulted Biden to the front of the pack.
Biden’s resurrection sets up a fight for the party’s
nomination between two starkly different candidates and
visions for the future: on one side Biden, a former Vice
President who boasts broad support among moderates,
African Americans and Democratic officials; on the
other Sanders, an independent democratic socialist with
a grassroots army that has animated this election cycle
but struggled to expand its ranks. Sanders casts the race
from here as a one-on-one scramble for delegates that
could continue all the way to the party’s nominating
convention in Milwaukee in July. Biden’s allies hoped
his momentum would become unstoppable and
Sanders would continue to fade.
Two other major candidates, Elizabeth Warren
and Mike Bloomberg, saw their hopes of a comeback
squelched. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New
York City mayor who spent more than $500 million
building a massive, Super Tuesday–focused operation
that yielded a single win in American Samoa,
announced March 4 that he would leave the race and
support Biden. And while Warren professed to be in
it for the long haul, she is 0 for 18 in state primaries,
and sank to third in her home state of Massachusetts.
Her campaign said she was meeting with aides to
determine next steps.
ThaT Biden and SanderS would be the last two
standing scarcely seemed possible even a week earlier.
Sanders had won the most votes in the first three
contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. After a
brutal start to his campaign, Biden’s resounding win in
the Feb. 29 South Carolina primary triggered a rapid
chain of events: Just hours before Super Tuesday
voting began, two of his top rivals, Pete Buttigieg and
Amy Klobuchar, threw their support behind him,
followed by another former candidate, Beto O’Rourke,
a favorite of Texas Democrats. Twenty-four hours
later, the returns confirmed his status
as the Democratic establishment’s
alternative to Sanders. As of March 4,
the former Vice President had
won Alabama, Arkansas, Maine,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, North
Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas
and Virginia. Six of the 10 victories were
by double-digit margins, allowing him
to rack up delegates, which are allocated
proportionally to candidates with at
least 15% of the vote. Sanders was
projected to win California, the biggest
delegate prize, as well as Colorado, Utah
and his home state of Vermont.
While Biden’s aides had expected
a strong showing in the South, the
campaign’s upset victory in Texas
was key given the state’s delegate
haul, the second largest of the night.
In the suburbs of cities like Houston
and Dallas, where Democrats’ gains
in 2018 helped lift them to the House
majority, moderate Democratic voters
appeared to recoil at Sanders’ liberalPOLITICS
The party
comes to Biden
By Molly Ball
THE BRIEF | SUPER TUESDAYSUPER
TUESDAY
RESULTS
Candidate delegate
tallies are current
as of 5:30 p.m. E.T.
on March 4. Map
shows the total
number of delegates
to be awarded by
each state and the
winner (or leader) of
each primary.THE DELEGATE RACESANDERS501BLOOMBERG53BIDEN566WARREN61CA
415UT
29 CO
67OK
37TX
228DROPPEDOUT12