Super tuesday

It’s (basically) officially over: former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden will face off again this November. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, the only remaining viable challenger to Trump, dropped out of the race this morning after eking out just one Super Tuesday victory in Vermont’s open primary. (And Biden challenger Dean Phillips suspended his campaign as well). It wasn’t exactly a surprise. One of her biggest donors, Americans for Prosperity, pulled support last week; she had no public events scheduled in South Carolina as reporters holed up in hotel rooms rather than flocking to watch parties, and she was eerily quiet for hours as results poured in.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley finally notched her first win in the GOP presidential primary, winning the Washington, DC contest by about thirty points, or 598 votes. Haley picked up nineteen delegates in the contest and now trails Donald Trump by 201 delegates.  The nation’s capital is arguably the worst place Haley could have achieved her first victory. The Trump campaign immediately used it as proof that she is in bed with the political establishment and fundamentally a candidate that can only win with the support of the consultant and donor class.

Joe Biden is projected to win all three states that voted in the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, advancing his delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders. Biden won Florida by a wide margin, garnering nearly 62 percent of the vote compared to Sanders’s 23 percent. Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders by a similar margin in 2016. Florida awards 219 delegates proportionally, putting Biden that much closer to the 1,991 delegates required to secure the nomination in the first round of voting at the Democratic National Convention. Poll workers in Florida noted lower turnout than usual due to fears over the coronavirus, a phenomenon that could have hurt Biden due to his popularity among older voters.

Joe Biden doesn't have the organization that Bernie Sanders has behind him. He doesn't have the money that Michael Bloomberg has. But he does have 'Joementum' and that could be all that matters. It's been more than enough for him on Super Tuesday so far. Having had his campaign written off in almost all media quarters, Biden suddenly finds himself with the kind of 'comeback narrative' energy that wins elections. Bloomberg's expensive experts can only look on jealously: Bloomberg has. Bernie Sanders had invested quite a lot of time and money in Virginia, the first state to announce results. But with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out, it seems Biden has hovered up the vast majority of their support.

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?

Bernie Sanders just lost his first primary of 2020. He’ll lose a few more on Tuesday. But as of now, in terms of delegates and polling alike, Bernie Sanders remains the Democratic front-runner. And Joe Biden has wound up, ironically, not as the frontrunner but as the 'Stop Bernie!' candidate. South Carolina was Biden’s first primary win in any of the presidential races he’s ever run, which stretch back to 1988. He’s had his eye on the White House for a very long time, and voters have consistently found other Democrats more compelling — other Democrats like Michael Dukakis, not just other Democrats like Barack Obama.