Thread by @PJverhagen

Bright and early, #SuperTuesday results breakdown!

Lets start with the obvious:

1. #BidenBounceback

And how it happened:

1. The party rallied
2. Demographics
3. Turnout(!)
4. the 'Losers'

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

16 "states" voted 1/20

14 states, 1 overseas territory and Democrats Abroad. At stake were a third of the delegates needed to win the nomination and its has been a dramatic race.

1. #BidenBounceback

Holy crap Biden had a fantastic night, only a couple of days ago his campaign looked like it was 2/20

dying. Yesterday he pulled off the most remarkable comeback in primary history.

He won in the south, he did well in the east, and he took the most interesting state: Texas. Ill break down the voters later on, but Biden absolutely surged over the past three days. I cannot

3/20

stress this enough, in some cases he gained 30 points in a matter of hours.

Lets zoom into Virginia, a very early indication of the good night Biden had. As soon as the polls closed it was called for him. Last week he was polling at +5 over Sanders, after SC it was +15 4/20

he won the state my 30 points yesterday. Minnesota he was polling at 8% last week, he won it yesterday with 39%.

He is competitive in Vermont, Sanders home state, he will win Texas, and is running pretty close in California. Make no mistake, this is a #BidenBlowout 5/20

he had a near perfect night.

But lets look less at what happened and more at how it happened.

1. The party rallied

Throughout this race the story was that there were too many candidates that were splitting up the vote. That has changed. With Pete and Amy giving 6/20

their support to Biden, a huge swing of moderate voters moved towards his camp. Together they were making up between 10-18% of the votes in different states. They were not viable by themselves, so instead they endorsed Biden.

If you take one thing away from my analysis 7/20

its this: The party rallied behind the candidate that has the best chance of beating Sanders.

2. Demographics

I've extensively covered black voters in my SC review. They once again went for Biden in huge numbers. Especially in North Carolina and Viriginia, two of the 8/20

states where Biden got the biggest margins.

What is super interesting is the Latino-Black split. A general trend was that Biden won black votes, and Sanders won Latino votes.

This is something that we will have to delve into, but Latino's tend to be a little younger 9/20

and generally are supportive of bigger governments with more services. The fracture between the black and latino vote will be a very interesting one going forward however!

Another big split is gender. Women went for Biden more than for Sanders, and especially on the 10/20

democratic side women make up a bigger share of the electorate. 53% of all voters and 54% went for Democrats in 2016. I'm not entirely sure where this split comes from but I imagine the questions swirling around the sometimes sexist online behavior of some of Sanders' 11/20

supporters would not help in this front. As a broader hypothesis it would be interesting to look into whether women generally favor more consensus building candidates or firebrands but thats for further study.

The last one is of course age, the younger you are the 12/20

more likely you are to support Sanders. But also the younger you are the less likely you are to vote. This is the dilemma that Sanders finds himself in, which leads us into the next point.

3. Turnout

Turnout was massive. Virginia had 785k voters in 2016 and saw 1326k(!!!) 13/20

Texas saw 1436k in 2016 and is heading towards 2170k. This trends holds in most states, and exceeded 2008 turnout in many cases!

There are no two ways about this, this is possible the worst signal for Sanders. He has premised his campaign on getting record turnout 14/20

and mobilizing voters that do not normally turned out.

This first this happened, and it resulted in a huge defeat for Sanders across the board. This really hurts his ability to continue making this argument and attacks a fundamental pillar of his campaign.

15/20

4. The losers

Sanders took a big blow today. He had the change to give a knockout punch to Biden tonight. Not only did he lose the expectation game tonight, but he lost a huge amount of delegates that could have helped him sow up the nomination. Warren's best performance 16/20

came in her home state of Massachusetts, where she came in a distant third. It remains very questionable whether she can continue on (even if she said she will). For Bloomberg this was straight up embarrassing. He picked up only American Samoa after spending 550 million 17/20

So where does that leave us? Depending on the exact outcome for Cali and Texas, this could put Biden in a commanding lead. The reason is that the map going forward looks better for Biden. There are multiple states where he could be strong, and if Bloomberg drops out 18/20

some of his support will flow to Biden. Also bear in mind that in Texas 7% of people still voted on Amy and Pete. That is support that will ultimately go to Biden as opposed to Sanders.

For Sanders there is not much good news. He didnt get the youth surge he was promising 19/20

and he did not make significant inroads with black voters. The same weaknesses that prevented him from getting the nomination in 2016 are still manifest and make his path forward questionable.

Biden is now the frontrunner with the best path going forward