Biden, Sanders win, Bloomberg loses Super Tuesday

This 4 March 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Senator Bernie Sanders addresses the crowd after the Super Tuesday results. Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, John Iadarola, and Jayar Jackson discuss Super Tuesday results on The Young Turks.

From Associated Press today:

“You cannot beat Trump with the same-old, same-old kind of politics”, Sanders declared, ticking down a list of past policy differences with Biden on Social Security, trade and military force. “This will become a contrast in ideas.”

The ‘same-old, same-old kind of politics’ with which Hillary Clinton managed in 2016 to lose to very deservedly unpopular Republican party candidate Donald Trump.

SANDERS SLAMS BIDEN ON IRAQ, SOCIAL SECURITY Late Tuesday, after Sanders had been declared the winner of primaries in Vermont, Colorado, Utah and California, he unloaded on Biden, reminding voters of some of the former vice president’s least progressive stances. [HuffPost]

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

Democratic Party leaders engineer Biden victory in most Super Tuesday states

4 March 2020

Former Vice President Joe Biden won the majority of the “Super Tuesday” states yesterday, capturing eight of the 14 states outright—Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won outright victories only in Colorado, Utah and Vermont. He had a significant lead in the largest state, California, but Texas, the second-largest state, was too close to call as vote counting continued into the night, as was Maine.

UPDATE: Sanders won in California. Where he had lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

From the Sanders campaign today:

The biggest state of the night was called for Bernie immediately after the polls closed.

And as we wait to see how many delegates we’ll net from California — a state with 30% of the delegates in play tonight — we have an important ask:

Make a $2.70 contribution to our campaign TONIGHT.

We always said the night would get better as it progressed, and our California victory is big.

This race is on. The super PACs will spend extraordinary sums of money to beat us in the states that follow. We need to be ready.

More from Bernie tomorrow morning.

Faiz Shakir
Campaign Manager

From CNN:

Still, in California, Sanders won more than 7 in 10 voters under age 30, and he won liberal voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin over Biden. A majority of California Democratic primary voters called for an overhaul of the economic system in the United States, expressing support for single-payer health care and free college. A majority said they had a favorable view of socialism. Biden, however, continued to show strength among older voters in California, winning voters over 65 by a 2-to-1 margin.

The generation grown up during the McCarthy witch hunt, when everything even of the palest pink was persecuted as deep red ‘Godless communism’; who, as primary school kids, went through the trauma of having to ‘duck and cover’ under school tables, supposedly saving their lives from nuclear war annihilation.

Unfortunately, young people are underrepresented among voters, as many may not trust any politician. Eg, Sanders gets most votes among young African Americans who do vote in primary elections; but most young African Americans don’t vote (also as a consequence of Republican party Trump administration attacks on their voting rights).

The Patrick Martin article continues:

How the 1,350 delegates from the 14 states are to be divided will not be known for several days. California and Texas account for half of these delegates, and mail ballots in California could be delivered as late as Friday. But it seems possible that Biden will take the lead in convention delegates, as opposed to the projections as recently as last week that Sanders would emerge from Super Tuesday with a lead of several hundred.

Sanders told a primary night crowd in Burlington, Vermont that he was doing well and expected to win the Democratic presidential nomination and defeat President Trump in November …

Rather than bow to Sanders’ apparent momentum after caucuses in Iowa and Nevada and the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic Party leadership intervened massively to bolster the faltering campaign of the most right-wing of the main contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The first step was delivering Biden a victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, where the endorsement of … Congressman James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, played a critical role.

The next step was to induce two of Biden’s rivals, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg to drop out. …

Klobuchar’s withdrawal helped deliver her home state of Minnesota to Biden, and the endorsements by Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and a slew of other Democratic Party leaders boosted Biden in Massachusetts, Texas and the whole range of Super Tuesday states.

This campaign to consolidate the Democratic Party behind Biden also had an effect on the campaigns of the remaining non-Sanders candidates. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, despite spending $500 million, failed to break the 15 percent threshold to obtain delegates in half the states that voted on Super Tuesday, although he did cross the threshold in California and Texas.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had a particularly poor showing, finishing third in her home state of Massachusetts and qualifying for delegates in a half dozen smaller states, but apparently falling short in both Texas and California.

Both Warren and Bloomberg were said to be discussing with campaign aides whether they should continue in the race.

While no overall vote totals are available for all 14 states, given the long delays in California, voter turnout was high, an indication of the growing politicization of the American population and the widespread popular opposition to the right-wing policies of the Trump administration.

Voter turnout in North Carolina, for example, rose significantly compared to 2016, when Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton, from under 1.1 million to more than 1.3 million. In Virginia, 1.2 million voted compared to only 781,000 in 2016. There were anecdotal accounts of long lines at polling places, both in areas where there was massive support for Sanders and … where Biden won the bulk of the vote.

But within the framework of the Democratic Party, the opposition to Trump is being diverted in a right-wing, pro-imperialist direction. The Democratic leadership wants to run the 2020 campaign as an extension of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment drive, portraying Trump as a Russian stooge and appealing for the support of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus for Trump’s removal. …

The New York Times wrote Tuesday in its analysis of the campaign, “Top Democrats now believe that there are only two realistic paths forward in the presidential race: a dominant victory on Tuesday by Mr. Sanders that gives him a wide lead in the delegate count, or a battle for delegates over months of primary elections, that might allow Mr. Biden to pull ahead or force the nomination to be decided at the Milwaukee convention in July.”

It now appears that Biden will go into the next two weeks of primaries, in large states like Michigan, Florida, Ohio and Illinois, with a lead in delegates and the full support of the Democratic Party apparatus in those states, as well as a flood of campaign cash from big money Democratic donors who have been holding back, waiting for the emergence of a single right-wing candidate.

TEXAS ‘RAPIDLY REDUCED’ POLLING SITES IN BLACK, LATINO AREAS Because growing Black and Latino communities in Texas mark a demographic shift in the state, many pollsters believe Texas is a tossup to swing in the 2020 elections and for years to come. But recently compiled data show Texas Democrats face structural obstacles to victory, including the closures of hundreds of polling places in counties with large or growing Black and Latino populations. [HuffPost]