Biden Wins Virginia and North Carolina as He Vies With Sanders on Super Tuesday

It was a remarkable show of strength for Biden, the former vice president, who was reeling after losing the first three nominating states but rebounded with a landslide win in South Carolina on Saturday. But as voters in 14 states and one territory went to the polls on Tuesday, Biden’s initial success offered only the first indication of the outcome on a day when about a third of the delegates in the Democratic race were at stake.

Sanders easily carried his home state of Vermont and was locked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in a competitive race in her home state. Sanders was also expected to perform strongly in California, the most important prize of the night, where polls had shown him with a solid lead over Biden.

As he did in South Carolina, Biden rolled to victory in the two Southern states thanks in large part to black voters: More than 60% of African-Americans in Virginia and North Carolina voted for the former vice president. Just as worrisome for Sanders, in two states filled with suburbanites, Biden performed well in a demographic that was crucial to the party’s success in the 2018 midterm elections: college-educated white women.

For his part, Sanders continued to show strength with the voters that have made up his political base: those under the age of 40. But his inability to expand his appeal with older voters and African-Americans doomed his candidacy in Virginia and North Carolina, just as it did in South Carolina.

Biden also easily carried Alabama, a state he was long expected to win, and exit polls showed him running up an enormous victory margin on the strength of his support from black voters.

The voting followed an extraordinary reframing of the race in the past 48 hours, as moderate candidates came together to form a united front against Sanders, a democratic socialist whose general election prospects are viewed skeptically by much of the party leadership. Biden’s overwhelming victory in South Carolina on Saturday established him as the clear front-runner in the Democrats’ centrist wing, prompting two rivals, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, to end their bids and throw their support to Biden.

As Sanders returned to Vermont, where he voted Tuesday morning, his allies acknowledged that they had been caught off guard by the swiftness with which Biden’s former adversaries had locked arms to oppose Sanders’ campaign. They argued that Sanders was still far better equipped — financially and in his campaign organization — than Biden to compete for the nomination over a long primary race. And they vowed to highlight to voters the sharp differences in their agendas.

Biden spent Tuesday in California, kicking off the morning at an upscale diner in Oakland before heading to Los Angeles to campaign and then attend a watch party. In his stump speech this week, Biden has taken to routinely hitting Sanders, arguing that the American people are more interested in results than in a “revolution.”

The two other major candidates, Warren and Bloomberg, faced a more daunting challenge, and both have either hinted or stated explicitly in recent days that the race may have shifted so much that their own chances of victory depend largely on the possibility of a contested convention.

Bloomberg, in Miami, repeatedly flashed irritation at questions about his political standing: Asked by one reporter whether he was siphoning votes from Biden and helping Sanders, Bloomberg countered that Biden was the one who was taking votes from him. Prodded about whether he could accept finishing third, Bloomberg replied: “There are only three candidates. You can’t do worse than that.”

When he was reminded of Warren’s presence in the race, he bristled: “I didn’t realize she’s still in. Is she?”

Biden will likely share delegates in Virginia and North Carolina with Sanders, but the former vice president’s continued strength with African-Americans illustrates his potential to emerge as the strongest moderate alternative to Sanders. If Bloomberg cannot make inroads with black voters, a pivotal constituency in Democratic primaries, it is not clear where he can make up ground.

For Bloomberg, the Virginia and North Carolina results were ominous because of the gaping spending gap: While he poured tens of millions of dollars into each state, Biden scarcely even advertised there, going on the airwaves only last week.

With their long tradition of elevating moderate Democrats, Virginia and North Carolina were fertile terrain for Biden. He got a lift from his triumph in nearby South Carolina, a state many Super Tuesday voters were watching to see whether Biden could recover from his early struggles, and then won a series of endorsements from party leaders, including many in Virginia.

His advantage only grew after Klobuchar and Buttigieg, who were competing for some of the same voters, withdrew from the race and gave their support to the former vice president.

Bloomberg had poured millions of dollars from his personal fortune into TV ads in the two states and made repeated appearances in both, with his advisers holding out the most hope in North Carolina. And while he has been more focused on liberal states, Sanders made multiple stops in Virginia and North Carolina in the weeks after the New Hampshire primary last month.

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The Super Tuesday contests were set to provide the first test of the Democratic presidential candidates on a truly national scale, gauging their appeal to a wide array of constituencies all at once. The map of states voting on Tuesday stretched from the northernmost reaches of New England, in Maine, across Alabama in the Deep South and Minnesota in the upper Midwest, out to Utah and California and far beyond to American Samoa.

Unlike most of the small states that held primaries and caucuses one by one in February, the simultaneous contests on Tuesday represented a diverse cross-section of the communities and constituencies that make up the American electorate.

There was a possibility — though perhaps not a likelihood — that they would render a decisive judgment on the race. Sanders had hopes, going into Tuesday, that he would be able to amass an insurmountable lead in the delegate count by running up wide margins in several states, most of all in California. Biden was aiming to block that outcome, and to do a good bit more than that, by uniting moderate forces in the Democratic Party under one banner for the first time in the race.

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The Democratic campaign barreled into Super Tuesday in a state of extraordinary flux, as a loose alliance of party leaders, elected officials and centrist voting blocs have seemed to fall in behind Biden since his weekend triumph in South Carolina. On Monday night, Biden made appearances in Texas with three former rivals — Klobuchar, Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke — who are now supporting his candidacy, while Sanders rallied supporters in Minnesota in an effort to capture Klobuchar’s home state.

And despite his late momentum, it was unclear whether Biden would be able to capture new support in a powerful enough way to catch up with Sanders, who spent most of the past month as a front-runner after eclipsing Biden and most of the other candidates in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

Few presidential candidates have endured the political roller coaster Biden has found himself riding in recent weeks. After finishing a distant fourth in Iowa and then coming in fifth in New Hampshire, he was short on money, in danger of losing support to Bloomberg and facing a do-or-die primary in South Carolina.

Yet after shaking up his campaign and installing a longtime adviser, Anita Dunn, as his chief strategist, Biden was able to claw back into contention by finishing second in Nevada. Then, after two solid debate performances during which his ascendant rivals were the ones under attack, he picked up a crucial endorsement: Rep. James E. Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress and the most influential South Carolina Democrat, came out for Biden at an emotional news conference.

With Clyburn’s imprimatur, Biden built a considerable advantage with black voters that propelled him to a 28-point rout in South Carolina.

His landslide victory immediately prompted what Biden had been seeking for months: a flood of support from Democratic leaders, donors and his onetime rivals. By Monday night, just 48 hours after what was his first victory over three separate presidential runs, Biden was at the rally in Dallas, gaining the endorsements of his three former opponents.

It was an extraordinary reversal of fortune for Biden, a former vice president and onetime front-runner. But looming over the sudden coalescence is the question of whether it came too late; millions of early votes had already been cast in Super Tuesday states, including in delegate lodes such as California and Texas.

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Sanders entered the day with a modest delegate advantage and was poised to extend his lead because, having consolidated much of the party’s left, he was better organized and better funded than any of the more moderate candidates.

Having finished at the top of Iowa and New Hampshire with less than 30% of the vote, Sanders extended his lead with a commanding victory in Nevada, where he demonstrated that he could expand his heavily white base to include Hispanic voters.

While he struggled with South Carolina’s majority-black electorate, Sanders went into Tuesday well positioned to capture most of the delegates in Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, Texas and, perhaps most important, California.

And after training his fire primarily at Bloomberg, Sanders is shifting to take on Biden. His campaign released a scorching online video citing Biden’s vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq and linking the former vice president to the Bush administration officials who oversaw the war there. At a rally on Monday night in St. Paul, Minnesota, the senator said that Biden was “wrong on the issues” and “wrong with regard to his vision for the future,” and he argued that Biden’s past support for free trade agreements would make it difficult for him to win in Midwestern states.

Just as significant, Sanders has shown only intermittent signs of acting as a front-runner trying to unite the party. While he used the Minnesota rally to invite supporters of Klobuchar and Buttigieg to join his campaign, he has also dismissed the surge of support to Biden, saying “the establishment” was rallying behind its own. Sanders has also continued to stir his base by highlighting how alarmed party leaders are about his candidacy.

“The establishment, the corporate establishment, the political establishment, you are making them very nervous,” he said on Sunday in Los Angeles.

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The propulsive energy behind both Biden and Sanders posed a challenge to two other formidable candidates, Warren and Bloomberg, who have charted drastically different paths to the final stages of the Democratic race. For Bloomberg, the Super Tuesday contests were the first time he appeared on a ballot, because he bypassed the February contests entirely.

Bloomberg, the wealthy former mayor of New York City, has been a pervasive presence in the race: He has run more than half a billion dollars in paid advertising since he announced his campaign in November, offering himself to the Democratic establishment as a potential savior if Biden failed to halt Sanders in the earliest primaries and caucuses.

Yet Bloomberg’s prospects were uncertain heading into Super Tuesday, after his disastrous performance in a debate last month in Las Vegas and Biden’s resurgence in the polls. His incessant advertising may have generated wide but shallow interest in his candidacy — the kind that may fade when voters are presented with another seemingly strong, and more familiar, option in Biden.

Bloomberg’s campaign publicly signaled he planned to forge ahead even if he faced a disappointing night, announcing plans to stump later this week in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and holding his election-night event in Florida, which holds a primary in two weeks. But advisers to Bloomberg have also acknowledged that the former mayor would make a cold assessment of his options once the results of Super Tuesday became known. He is likely to face intense pressure to make way for Biden if his self-funded candidacy does not yield impressive results.

Warren could face pressure of a different kind, though she is seen as less likely than Bloomberg to bow to the results on Tuesday. Unlike Bloomberg, Warren did compete in the first four primaries and caucuses, with disappointing results that left her poorly positioned to win any states this week except perhaps Massachusetts, the state she represents in the Senate. Polls there showed Warren locked in a tight race with Sanders for the lead, leaving her vulnerable to what could be a deeply embarrassing loss on her home turf.

Still, Warren, with replenished financial coffers, has vowed to press ahead in the race and to pick up as many delegates as possible, on the way to what her advisers believe will be a contested convention in Milwaukee this summer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .