(Bloomberg) — Bernie Sanders won the biggest prize of the Super Tuesday primaries with a victory in California, but Joe Biden staged a surprise comeback in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination with victories in eight states.Biden scored wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama and Minnesota. And in one of the biggest upsets of the night, he won Massachusetts, delivering symbolic blows to Sanders, who had been expected to win there, and to the candidacy of the state’s senator, Elizabeth Warren.Sanders, who had supplanted Biden as the front-runner in national polls, picked up Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont in addition to California. Biden held a narrow lead over Sanders in Texas. Maine remained too close to call.Even with the loss in California, Biden’s results were a remarkable turnabout for a candidate who was on the ropes only days earlier. A decisive win on Saturday in South Carolina rallied the Democratic Party leadership around Biden as the moderate alternative to Sanders, who’s seen by the party establishment as a candidate who won’t be able to defeat Trump and could damage candidates elsewhere on the ballot. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar fell in line, dropping out and endorsing Biden.“Just a few days ago the press and the pundits had declared the campaign dead,” Biden told supporters in Los Angeles. “I’m here to report, we are very much alive.”Sanders said he remains confident that he will prevail and win the nomination.“We’re going to win because the people understand our campaign, our movement is best-positioned to defeat Donald Trump,” Sanders told supporters at a rally in Vermont.Tuesday’s contests across 14 states, plus American Samoa, awarded more than a third of all delegates to the Democratic convention in July in Milwaukee. The biggest day of the presidential primary calendar will define the nomination fight for Sanders and Biden and determine whether Warren and Michael Bloomberg have a rationale for carrying on their campaigns.Warren’s LossThe Super Tuesday round of primaries marks the first time Bloomberg has appeared on the Democratic presidential ballot, and he collected his first delegates by winning American Samoa. He and Warren, whose third-place finish in her home state was a stinging loss, will confront the question of whether to continue in the race if they don’t collect a substantial number of delegates.(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)Sanders and Biden headed into the night close in delegate tallies. Sanders emerged from the first four contests with 60 delegates, but Biden’s big win in South Carolina on Saturday brought him within six delegates of his chief rival.One of Biden’s main goals on Tuesday was to prevent Sanders from building an insurmountable lead that would carry him into the party convention. Biden is keeping the race much closer than predicted just a week ago.Television network exit polls showed Biden benefited from his convincing Feb. 29 win in South Carolina. Almost 30% of voters in Super Tuesday states made their pick in “the last few days,” according to early results from exit polls of voters in 12 states reported by NBC. The late deciders overwhelmingly favored Biden: 47 percent of those who decided in the last few days chose the former vice president, compared to 21% for Sanders, 14% for Warren and 11% for Bloomberg.Biden also had an advantage with African-American voters, who make up a sizable portion of the Democratic electorate in Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Arkansas. He won 63% of the black vote in Virginia and North Carolina, according to network exit polls reported by CNN.That also will help later in the month when major caches of delegates will be available in primaries in Michigan, Florida, Illinois and Ohio.“After Super Tuesday they’re all opportunities. I think I’ll do well in Florida, Michigan, it goes down the line,” Biden said Tuesday.Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist who many in the party establishment fear would return Trump to the White House. Sanders argues that the country is hungry for a “political revolution,” and he has grown a diverse base with promises of free health care, free housing, free college tuition and free child care, as well as plans to levy steep taxes on the wealthy and corporations.But heading in the next round of primaries, the Vermont senator will no longer benefit from a broad field of contenders splitting support from moderate voters, and it will be up to Biden to harness the momentum from his latest wins and turn Klobuchar’s and Buttigieg’s decisions to end their campaigns and endorse him into actual votes. His campaign has stumbled before.Warren and Bloomberg have so far indicated they planned to stay in the race. Some party leaders have been calling for Bloomberg to drop out to clear the way for Biden. The former New York mayor brushed off questions Tuesday about withdrawing.“Joe’s taking votes away from me,” he said. “Have you asked Joe whether he’s going to drop out?”Bloomberg acknowledged that the only way he can secure the Democratic nomination is if neither Biden nor Sanders wins a majority of delegates and the decision is left to a battle at the party convention in July.The stakes couldn’t be higher for a party that’s still reeling from Trump’s 2016 victory and is weighing diametrically opposite approaches to winning back the blue-collar, working-class voters along the Rust Belt that had long served as its electoral firewall — Biden’s centrist vision or Sanders’ populist one.And if voters Tuesday fail to winnow the field, the odds of a contested convention – a political occurrence unseen in almost 70 years – will soar, further emboldening the incumbent president and diminishing the odds of a successful opposition challenge.–With assistance from Max Berley, Jennifer Epstein and Tyler Pager.To contact the reporters on this story: Joe Sobczyk in Washington at [email protected];Justin Sink in Washington at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at [email protected], Joe Sobczyk, Larry LiebertFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
