Biden and Sanders Emerge as Dual Front-Runners

The Democratic presidential race emerged from Super Tuesday with two clear front-runners: former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Biden won Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and at least six other states, largely through support from African Americans and moderate voters. Sanders won the primary map’s biggest prize, California, and several other states by harnessing the backing of liberals and young voters. 

Biden and Sanders represent two competing wings of the Democratic Party: Biden in the center and Sanders on the left. Their two other major rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, finished well behind them. 

Biden’s victories came chiefly in the South and the Midwest, and in some of them he won by unexpectedly wide margins (see map). In a surprising upset, Biden even captured Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, where he did not appear in person, and where Sanders had campaigned aggressively in recent days.

“We were told, well, when you got to Super Tuesday, it’d be over,” a triumphant Biden, 77, said at a celebration in Los Angeles. “Well, it may be over for the other guy!”

Even Biden appeared surprised at the extent of his success. “I’m here to report we are very much alive!” he said. “And make no mistake about it, this campaign will send Donald Trump packing.”

It was a remarkable show of force for Biden. In just three days he resurrected a campaign that had been on the verge of collapse after he lost contests in the first three nominating states (Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada). But he bounced back with a landslide win in South Carolina on Saturday, and on Tuesday, in addition to victories in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Massachusetts, he won in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Minnesota.

Sanders rebounded late in the evening in delegate-rich Western states: He was quickly declared the winner in Colorado and Utah after polls closed there, and he also claimed the largest delegate lode of the primary race, California, The Associated Press reported. Sanders also easily carried his home state of Vermont.

Sanders, 78, expressed confidence when he addressed a huge crowd of supporters in Vermont: "Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence that we are going to win the Democratic nomination, and we are going to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country,” he said.

President Donald Trump, running essentially unopposed, swept the Republican Super Tuesday primaries. 

The dynamic of the race for the Democratic nomination was changed in the days before Super Tuesday by Biden’s landslide victory in South Carolina and by last-minute endorsements for Biden from Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, both of whom had dropped out of the race after poor showings in South Carolina. Former congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination in November, also endorsed Biden the day before Super Tuesday. 

Biden’s sweep of states across the South and the Midwest showed he had the makings of a formidable coalition that could propel him through the primaries. As he did in South Carolina, Biden captured the support of large majorities of African Americans. And he also performed well with a demographic that was crucial to the Democratic party’s success in the 2018 midterm elections: college-educated white voters.

For his part, Sanders continued to show strength with the voters who have made up his political base: Latinos, liberals, and those under age 40. But he struggled to expand his appeal among older voters and African Americans. 

“You cannot beat Trump with the same-old, same-old kind of politics,” Sanders said. “What we need is a new politics that brings working-class people into our political movement.”

The Super Tuesday results were a significant setback for Bloomberg, who entered the race late and spent more than half a billion dollars of his own money on an aggressive advertising campaign. But Bloomberg slumped badly after a series of poor debate performances. Bloomberg won only one contest, the caucuses in American Samoa. Bloomberg announced Wednesday morning that he was suspending his campaign.

Warren’s loss in her home state of Massachusetts left her without a single victory after a month of primaries and caucuses, and in many places on Tuesday she was running in a relatively distant third or fourth place. 

On Wednesday morning, not all the votes had been counted, but Biden had taken the lead over Sanders in the national delegate count—390 to 330. The two front-runners were way ahead of Warren and Bloomberg, who had earned only 36 and 12 delegates, respectively. 

The next contests in the race for the Democratic nominee come next Tuesday, March 10, when voters in Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington State will weigh in. A candidate needs 1,991 delegates to win the Democratic nomination.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns cover politics for The New York Times.