Biden won many of the states without any campaign spending, which is unprecedented. How did he do that?
With Virginia called for Biden right when polls closed at 7pm it was clear that Super Tuesday was going to play out a lot differently than it was expected to. Building on momentum from his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary, Biden dominated the Super Tuesday states. Biden is thus far winning 9 of the 11 called contests and is competitive to win the remaining three states. This strong performance was a sharp contrast to expectations which, even after revisions to be more favorable to Joe Biden post-South Carolina, still predicted Sanders would win most of the night’s contests and come away with a delegate lead, perhaps even a significant one. Instead, even with more than a million ballots still outstanding in the California primary, it is Biden, not Sanders who holds the delegate lead, and with it, a possible lock on a nomination that less than two weeks ago provoked a flurry of columns about brokered conventions.
So, what happened to so dramatically alter the contours of the race and make Biden, not Sanders the frontrunner and quite possibly, the presumptive nominee? To be sure, much attention will be given to the decisions of fellow moderates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to withdraw from the race the night before the Super Tuesday contests and endorse Joe Biden with the hopes that in so doing, they could help steer the party’s nomination away from Bernie Sanders, who many in the party openly worried threatened the Democrats’ ability to beat Donald Trump in the fall as well as down-ticket races for the Senate, House, and a host of state legislative seats. But the winnowing of the field, even in the spectacular fashion it played out on Monday night in Dallas, Texas, likely has less to do with the results than the fact that Sanders’ candidacy ultimately hit the same demographic brick wall it hit in its 2016 iteration.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
