WASHINGTON - With the dramatic winnowing of the Democratic presidential field, the 14 nominating contests held on Tuesday largely came down to a single question: Could former Vice President Joe Biden amass enough delegates to slow US Senator Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination?
As polls closed in the eastern United States, the emerging answer appeared to be "Yes." Polls showed Biden, whose candidacy was buoyed this week by a wave of high-profile endorsements, outperforming expectations.
The Super Tuesday contests offer the biggest one-day haul of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the party’s nomination at its national convention in July, with about 1,357 delegates, or nearly one-third of the total number, up for grabs.
Here are some initial takeaways from Super Tuesday voting.
A BIDEN COALITION
It appeared clear early on that Biden benefited from the last-minute endorsements from former presidential contenders Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. The Democratic establishment increasingly is coalescing around him as an alternative to Sanders, a democratic socialist.
North Carolina and Virginia were called for Biden immediately when polls closed, with exit polls suggesting Biden was headed for decisive wins.
Those polls suggested Biden was building the broad coalition needed for a presidential nominee. Beyond Biden's longstanding support among African-American voters, he looked to be beating Sanders in both states among white voters who did not graduate from college – a traditional Sanders stronghold.
Perhaps most important for the Democratic race, Biden was easily outperforming Sanders with women voters. More than half of the women in the US now identify with the Democratic Party, according to recent studies.
THE DELEGATE MATH
For Biden, the goal on Tuesday was to draw as near to Sanders in terms of overall pledged delegates to the Democratic national convention as possible. Going into Super Tuesday, Sanders held a slight lead over Biden because of his success in earlier primaries, or nominating contests.
It remained unlikely that Biden would be able to pull even with Sanders. Still, a strong showing might slow Sanders’ momentum enough to allow Biden to catch him in upcoming primaries.
Virginia and North Carolina offered 209 delegates between them, with the delegates awarded proportionally based on the candidates' share of the electorate.
Both Sanders and Biden will finish Tuesday with fewer than 1,000 each, still short of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination.
A BITTER PILL FOR BLOOMBERG
The result in Virginia is a particularly bitter disappointment for former New York mayor and media mogul Mike Bloomberg, who made winning the state a top priority.
It was the first state where he held a campaign event after announcing his candidacy, and recent polls showed him competitive in the state.
Final vote totals had Bloomberg finishing below the 15 percent threshold needed to win delegates, shutting him out in that state. He appeared to be in slightly better shape in North Carolina.
Even so, such a disastrous showing in what appeared to be winnable states will likely intensify calls for the billionaire, who spent more than $200 million of his own fortune on ads for Super Tuesday, to exit the Democratic race in favor of Biden.
BEATING TRUMP
The exit polls appeared to bolster Biden’s claim that he is best positioned to defeat President Donald Trump in the general election in November.
Polls from North Carolina and Virginia gave him a clear advantage over Sanders among voters who said they would rather have a nominee who can beat Trump than who agrees with them on major issues. In Virginia, for example, 64% of those who prioritized beating Trump backed Biden compared to just 16% for Sanders.
Such results appeared to suggest a growing belief within the party that nominating Sanders would hand Trump a second term.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON — A resurgent Joe Biden rode a wave of momentum to win at least 8 large states on Super Tuesday, but Bernie Sanders won the biggest prize of California to set up a long one-on-one battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden rolled to wins across the South, Midwest and New England on the biggest day of the Democratic campaign, as Americans in 14 states voted for a Democratic challenger to Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election.
"They don't call it Super Tuesday for nothing," Biden, the former vice president who had performed poorly in the first 3 nominating contests but broke through with a win in South Carolina, told roaring supporters in California.
"We are very much alive," he said.
Sanders, the one-time front-runner who had hoped to take a big step toward the nomination on Tuesday, was projected by Edison Research to win in his home state of Vermont, Colorado and Utah. Fox News and AP projected Sanders won California.
Edison Research projected Biden the winner in Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia.
More than one-third of the delegates who will pick the eventual nominee at a July convention were up for grabs in the primaries on Tuesday, which provided some clarity at last in a muddled race for the White House.
Without naming him, Sanders took direct aim at Biden during a rally with supporters in Vermont, criticizing his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq and his support for global trade deals that Sanders opposed.
"We're going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country," Sanders said.
The results left Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor who spent more than half a billion dollars on advertising, largely out of the running, with his only victory coming in the US territory of American Samoa.
Bloomberg campaign officials said he would reassess whether to stay in the race on Wednesday, but that did not mean he would drop out.
Biden's burst of momentum after his blowout win in South Carolina on Saturday fueled a flurry of endorsements from a flood of prominent party officials and former rivals.
BROAD BIDEN COALITION
Biden accomplished his main Super Tuesday goal of muscling aside Bloomberg and consolidating support from moderates to turn the race into a one-on-one contest against Sanders.
Biden's showing in the Super Tuesday states was fueled by strong support among a broad coalition of voters including women and men, white and black, those with or without college degrees, and those who considered themselves liberal or moderate.
The results were particularly disappointing for US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who finished well behind Sanders and Biden in most states and was trailing them in her home state of Massachusetts.
Edison Research forecast a record turnout of 1.3 million voters in Virginia, well ahead of 986,203 in 2008 and 785,041 in 2016.
Early exit polls by Edison Research showed Biden was winning large majorities of African-American voters in the South, including 72 percent in Alabama, 71 percent in Virginia, 63 percent in North Carolina and 62 percent in Tennessee.
In Virginia, Biden won the votes of more than 4 of 10 white college educated women, compared to about 2 in 10 each for Sanders and Warren.
Bloomberg was a wild card heading into the voting, as he joined the competition for the first time. In early results, he was winning more than 15 percent of the vote, enough to pick up some delegates, in Tennessee, Texas, Colorado and Arkansas.
The moderate Bloomberg skipped the first four contests and bombarded Super Tuesday and later voting states with ads, but saw his poll numbers slip after coming under fire during Democratic debates over past comments criticized as sexist and a policing policy he employed as New York's mayor seen as racially discriminatory.
Biden is trying to build a bridge between progressive Democrats' desire for big structural change and more moderate Democrats yearning for a candidate who will be able to win over enough independents and Republicans to oust Trump.
FRESH MOMENTUM
That effort gained fresh momentum on the eve of Tuesday's voting as moderate presidential rivals Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, endorsed Biden after withdrawing from the race.
The pace of the Democratic race begins to accelerate after Super Tuesday, with 11 more states voting by the end of March. By then, nearly two-thirds of the delegates will have been allotted.
Sanders headed into Tuesday with 60 delegates to Biden's 54 in the state-by-state nominating fight. Sanders managed a virtual tie with Buttigieg in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire and Nevada.
Besides leading in polls in California, Sanders also is ahead of Biden by a smaller margin in polls in Texas. Sanders' strength with Hispanics should pay dividends in that state, where Latinos comprise one-third of the Democratic electorate.
Biden, whose South Carolina win affirmed his popularity with black voters, hoped to win five states where African Americans make up at least a quarter of the Democratic electorate: Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas.
The next contests, on March 10, will be in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington state.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee — Consider it progress for a presidential candidate on a steep learning curve: Michael Bloomberg now thanks his hecklers.
That is not how he has always handled unwanted interruptions on the campaign trail. In Nashville, Tennessee, in December, for instance, Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, took the bait when environmental activists started shouting at him. “I’m doing more on the climate than you’ve even dreamed of,” he snapped, according to CBS News. “I’ve put a fortune into this thing.”
But on a return trip to Tennessee last month, when a man in Chattanooga started bellowing “Bernie! Bernie!” in the middle of Bloomberg’s speech, the candidate had all the graciousness of a maître d’ tending to a displeased patron.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling and continuing on with his remarks. Later, in Memphis, Tennessee, Houston, and just about anywhere else a protester yelled out mid-speech — there is almost always one — Bloomberg delivered the same reply, “Thank you for making me feel like I’m at home in New York.”
Bloomberg’s bid for the presidency, which faces its first test before voters Tuesday when 14 states go to the polls, has exposed to the country what New Yorkers have long known: He was never admired for his gifts as a retail politician.
Now as he tries to connect with Americans who know little about him, other than what they see in his ubiquitous, slickly produced ads, his campaign is trying to buff the rough exterior of a 77-year-old who can be surly, inelegant and averse to talking about himself in a way that voters find revealing and personal.
His aides have warned him about rolling his eyes in public, especially during presidential debates. Though they initially said no to appearances on cable news town-hall-style programs, some advisers acknowledged that Bloomberg could have benefited from the practice, if only they had agreed to do them before last week. They have shown him television clips of surrogates who have defended the most damaging moments from Bloomberg’s past, like his defense of racially biased policing practices, more persuasively than he has.
And when he is faced with questions about his wealth, aides have pointed him toward polling that has shown voters respond favorably when they learn he did not inherit his money, but earned it himself.
In an interview, Bloomberg said he did not believe that voters would see this as an election where charisma is paramount, given how deeply many Americans feel that President Donald Trump has led the country in the wrong direction.
As president, he said, “You have to have somebody that the public thinks, ‘Whether I like the guy or the woman or not, he is smart, well meaning and knows how to manage the process.’ ” As for the subject of his wealth, he said, “it’s tricky,” adding: “People in America fundamentally don’t want to take away what you have. They want to find a way so that they can get it as well.”
So his speeches include a line that hits directly at the self-made part of his biography, and a personal critique of the president’s signature legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, in which the benefits went disproportionately to wealthy people like Bloomberg.
“I didn’t need a tax cut, thank you very much,” he said last week in Oklahoma City.
Still, delivering a good line off a teleprompter — Bloomberg reads from one at almost every public event — means little if he cannot nail the moments when the script isn’t there. And then there are the times he mangles the script anyway, like telling the crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina, how nice it was to be in “Gainesboro.” Or how much he was looking forward to competing in “Super Bowl Tuesday.”
His audiences seem not to mind terribly much. In Greensboro, a few people in the crowd called out to correct him, but that was the end of it. “Very, very impressed,” said Jimmy Sipsis, 60, a property manager and self-described independent. “Based on his record, you look at it, and see he can stand up there and say, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done that.’ ”
Once Bloomberg entered the race late last year, the campaign benefited from almost two months in which the candidate could hone his public speaking skills, rusty and sclerotic after a decade since his last run, without too much scrutiny. The attention of the political world was trained on Iowa and New Hampshire, where Bloomberg did not compete, so hardly anyone noticed the gaffes like when he opened a campaign office in Denver in early February and joked about wishing someone else could have spoken for him so that he could spend the day at his home in Vail, Colorado.
His campaign strategy was never to pretend to have a feel-your-pain magic touch. Instead, it has leaned hard into his experience running the nation’s largest city through trying times, like the recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Sandy, an approach his aides hope will help elevate him above his rivals given the events of the past week.
With a 3-minute, direct-to-camera television ad that will air nationwide Sunday night and a sharpened stump speech highlighting his leadership as mayor, Bloomberg is hoping to draw a stark contrast with Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and the managerial records of some of his Democratic opponents.
At his first appearance in a televised debate last month, he was halting, flat and silent as his opponents pummeled him over his record as mayor, and allegations that he had spoken demeaningly of women. His second debate performance was more aggressive and confident, though he had moments when he flubbed what should have been easy comebacks. At one point, when defending his commitment to the Democratic Party by explaining how he had spent $100 million helping Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018, he caught himself after almost saying he “bought” the majority that made Nancy Pelosi the speaker. “I got them,” he said, making the moment only slightly less awkward.
Those who attend his campaign events now hear a message that is tightly focused on his appeal as the “un-Trump,” a pitch that has been redrafted multiple times in the two months he has been campaigning full time. There is an element of high and low to the approach, in which Bloomberg boasts of policy achievements like fighting for stricter gun control legislation and closing coal-fired power plants (even when he’s in eastern Tennessee, the heart of coal country) in one paragraph and, in the next, goads the president.
Seeing little use for subtlety, Bloomberg and his advisers have taken an approach they hope will not just showcase his competence as a leader, but also expose some of Trump’s biggest insecurities
“It’s not all about Trump, but there are useful moments when we can invoke Trump, compare Mike to him and poke the bear,” said Tim O’Brien, a journalist who wrote a biography about Trump and is now working as one of Bloomberg’s senior advisers. “It’s so easy,” he added.
Needling Trump, who has taken the bait by responding with a flurry of angry tweets about “Mini Mike,” is one thing Bloomberg needs little coaching to do.
The president so loathes the informality of “Donald” that he demanded that contestants on his reality show “The Apprentice” refer to him as “Mr. Trump,” yet Bloomberg repeatedly calls him by his first name.
In one regular line of Bloomberg’s that gets a guaranteed laugh, he says, “People ask me, ‘Do you really want a general election between two New York billionaires?’ To which I say, ‘Who’s the other one?’”
The contrast to Trump is at the core of Bloomberg’s campaign. He closes out his pitch to voters by making the differences, as he sees them, between the two 70-something New Yorkers clear.
“Even though Donald and I are both from New York, the truth is we could not be more different,” he said recently in Nashville. “He breaks promises, I keep them. He divides people, I unite them. He’s a climate change denier. I’m an engineer.”
“He looks out for people who inherited their wealth like him,” Bloomberg added, “and I’m self-made.”
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