For the first time since its inception for the 1988 presidential election 32 years ago, “Super Tuesday” finally lived up to its promise.
These were the days when Democrats controlled virtually every Southern legislature, and most white Southerners, in homage to their Civil War heritage, were registered Democrats. Moderate Democratic politicians came up with the idea of holding early primaries in many Southern states to raise the chances of moderate candidates doing better in November than the nominees who lost to former President Richard Nixon and then-President Ronald Reagan.
The strategy worked in 1988, but for Republicans. Democrats Al Gore and Jesse Jackson each won five Southern states, but Florida, Texas, and four primaries outside the South were won by the eventual candidate, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush’s Republican campaign manager, Lee Atwater, held a primary in South Carolina on the Saturday before Super Tuesday. Bush’s victory was followed by a near landslide victory on Super Tuesday that clinched the nomination — a feat repeated by Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000 and John McCain in 2008.
This year, after nearly a third of a century, the intentions of the Democratic inventors of Super Tuesday were finally realized — with a little aid from the tardy Lee Atwater and 28-year-old South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, who endorsed Biden three days before the primary.
Previous polls had shown black voters abandoning former Vice President Joe Biden in favor of Senator Bernie Sanders, but Clyburn’s credibility with black and white voters gave Biden a landslide victory over Sanders by a margin of 49% to 20%.
In the blink of an eye—three days—hundreds of thousands of Super Tuesday voters have apparently changed their minds in a process that once took an entire campaign season. Biden has won impressive victories in 10 of the 14 Super Tuesday states. But there are caveats.
One is that, just as Republicans were divided between college and non-college voters in 2016, Democrats are divided between aged and juvenile voters this year. Exit polls in seven Super Tuesday states show Biden winning with people over 45 by an average of 26 points, while Sanders is winning with people under 45 by an average of 29 points. Will juvenile voters — especially juvenile Latinos and blacks, many of whom preferred Sanders — vote in November? Or will they vote for President Donald Trump?
Biden emerges from Super Tuesday with more delegates than Sanders, though California, as usual, could take weeks to count votes and allocate delegates. That leaves Biden a whisker away from a sure bet for the nomination.
He looks likely to win a senior delegate advantage in Florida, but only three more heavily black Southern states (Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi) have yet to vote. Key industrial states in November 2016 (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin) have not yet spoken and remain a mystery.
Still, given Michael Bloomberg’s withdrawal from the race, the likelihood of neither candidate entering the convention with a majority of delegates seems slim to none.
In the general election, it’s unclear whether Biden can win a majority among blacks in the same way that Barack Obama did, and Super Tuesday results show him weaker among Latinos than Bernie Sanders. It’s also unclear whether Democrats can replicate their 2018 surge among affluent suburbanites. Biden won affluent suburbs in Virginia, North Carolina and Texas, but lost in areas around Denver and Austin. Additionally, early results in a California House race suggest Democrats risk losing some of the suburban congressional seats they won in 2018.
Even in winning, Biden has shown obvious flaws as a candidate. His years of verbosity seem increasingly at risk of turning into incoherence. But of course Sanders has his flaws—why defend Fidel Castro?—and of course Trump does, too.
These flaws are evidence of my oft-stated thesis that the presidential nominating process is the weakest part of our political system. Super Tuesday played its intended role, with James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden coinciding with the brilliance of Lee Atwater. But as FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver notes, chance also played a role: the inability of Iowa Democrats to pick a winner in the primary and the release of a single poll that qualified Michael Bloomberg for what turned out to be his disastrous debate performance in South Carolina.
One last word on California. This year, she joined Super Tuesday, ostensibly to get candidates and press to notice her. Instead, she was slammed with Bloomberg ads (no one else could afford them), quietly held fundraisers for multiple candidates, and is now spending weeks counting votes. Let’s go back to June!
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a fellow at the (*32*) Enterprise Institute, and a longtime contributor to The Almanac of (*32*) Politics.
