The NPR Politics Podcast - Mike Bloomberg Drops Out; Demographics Of Biden's Supporters

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Joe Biden's victories on Super Tuesday illustrated the importance of campaign momentum. He won in several states where he had little to no campaign infrastructure and did not advertise. That was possible because of his commanding support from African Americans and older voters.Also, Mike Bloomberg exits the race and Elizabeth Warren considers her future.This episode: congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, demographics and culture reporter Juana Summers, and senior political editor/correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's Dana here from the sunny West Coast. I'd hoped and I'd prayed that the show I'd liked most would finally launch a daily edition, which thankfully now has come to fruition. Before I was lost and of news a bit wary, the political climate had gotten quite scary. But the politics pod has now saved the day, decoding the truth from the din and the fray. So sit down, relax, and tip your hat to this glorious pod recorded at 2.34 p.m. on Wednesday, March 4th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show. Very talented. Should we snap? I feel like the English major in me appreciates the poetry. We all appreciate the poetry. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Kelsey Snell.

I cover Congress. I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And the fallout from Super Tuesday has begun. It's still falling. Indeed.

If you remember, I entered the race for president to defeat Donald Trump. And today I am leaving the race for the same reason, to defeat Donald Trump, because staying in would make it more difficult to achieve that goal. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ended his presidential campaign and had one of the shortest runs out of any of the two dozen candidates we had. So what did all of that money get him, Domenico? Not a whole heck of a lot. I mean, he only has 53 delegates. He may wind up with more than that, but he spent half a billion dollars, billion with a B. That is a lot of money. It's only rivaled maybe per delegate by Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign, who spent about $60 million for one delegate.

That is a wild amount of money. Yeah, it's pretty spectacular. He'd invested in a number of states and was really banking on the early vote, had this really impressive field organization in a number of these states, had more on the ground staffers than any other candidate. And yet it is clear that this did not go the way that Mike Bloomberg and his aides had planned. He didn't get a lot out of this, but I think the big winner here might be Democrats who will now be benefiting from all of Mike Bloomberg's money that he is no longer spending on his own campaign and that we're likely to see him spend to, say, Joe Biden, who he's endorsed, as well as other Democrats down ballot and other causes as we've seen him do in past election cycles.

What Democratic officials have told me when I talked to them about Bloomberg spending all this money early on, they said, look, as long as he is attacking President Trump, we're fine with it. He laid the groundwork for that. He says he will support whoever the Democratic nominee is. And look, he certainly is showing that he's willing to spend quite the fortune to oust Donald Trump from the White House. So Bloomberg got out, but we still have a few more candidates left in there, including Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, that's right.

And we don't know what she's going to do yet. She said that she is reassessing her campaign, looking at her path forward. We know that she's been beaten in her home state of Massachusetts last night, but she came in third there. So we'll wait to see what she does next. She's gotten a lot of support from a lot of influential progressive leaders in the days ahead of Super Tuesday, but we don't know what comes next for her. You know, last night we broke down the key results from all of the states that voted. And today I want to kind of zero in on some of the more specific data that we know about today as we're looking backward. And I kind of want to start with you, Anna, if that's OK.

You cover demographics in this campaign. And Joe Biden's campaign has been saying for months that they would make their way by winning black voters, particularly in the South. Is that what we saw? It's exactly what we saw. You know, February was a really trying month for Joe Biden. He got beat in contest after contest, and he and his aides kept telling you and I and others that he would deliver a win in South Carolina, the first state with a majority of Black voters, and that if that happened,

it would catapult him to a slew of victories on Super Tuesday and beyond. And that's what we saw. Just as one example, in Alabama, where Black voters make up about half of the electorate, Joe Biden won them by more than 60 percentage points, the kind of margin that gave him kind of a crush of delegates. He won black voters by more than 50 percentage points in Virginia. In Texas, which was a surprise win for him, he won black voters by more than 40 percentage points. So just putting up big numbers with them across the South in a way that was able to give him a really big night on Tuesday. I mean, momentum is one thing, but we have never seen this kind of turnaround where Biden's campaign and candidacy was essentially dead unless he won in South Carolina. He wins,

beats expectations, and then comes out of that with all that momentum because it looked like Bernie Sanders was running away with the nomination. Moderates coalesced in a way that we have never quite seen before as other candidates dropped out and in full force wholeheartedly got behind Joe Biden. Right. That goes to another point that I wanted to get to, Domenico. Joe Biden won people who were making up their minds at the last minute, people who were deciding day of. I'm wondering, is this all credited to people like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, who when they dropped out endorsed Biden, or is something else happening here? I think that's a big part of it. But what we had seen during the campaign all throughout was that no matter what the polls said, if you looked inside the numbers, some three

quarters of Democrats said they could change their mind. And that showed a lot of volatility and a lot of softness with whoever they were supporting. But there are still two pretty distinct lines within this party, those who want bold progressive change, and those who are more in the incremental camp bite off what you can chew. Look, clearly, that part of the party decided that Bernie Sanders will go too far for them. And they all decided to go one way. I think the other thing that's important to note here, too, is that in these victories that Joe Biden had on Tuesday night, he also won big in a number of places where he didn't spend a lot of time and where he didn't really make an investment in a field program.

So kind of tossing some of the conventional wisdom, you know, on how you win states out the window to Domenico's earlier point, momentum mattered more than money for this. And it worked out in Joe Biden's favor. We talked a lot last night, you and I, about the political alignment of Latino voters in particular. You know, the difference of the demographics of where Latino voters in Texas are politically and where they are, say, in California. Can we talk a little bit more about that? Sure. So we say this all the time and I know it kind of gets old, but Latino voters are not a monolith. And the realities of those voters look very different in these states.

But what's interesting is that Bernie Sanders won Latinos in both of these states. He has invested so heavily in on-the-ground program in Spanish language advertisements, as we've reported, folks calling him T.O. Bernie or Uncle Bernie, as he's been out on the ground stumping, deploying a ton of surrogates. He's just made a huge investment. And I think what's going to be interesting is seeing he's won them in these states. But as we look forward down the primary calendar, there are other states with Latino populations that look different than even California and Texas, where he may not be as popular. So they may not be the national firewall

that he's had them be in the past. And let's talk about age. That's the last part that I think that we really need to get to here, the major demographic that split in a pretty dramatic way. We saw Biden picking up older voters and Sanders picking up younger voters. That's something that we've talked about anecdotally. But Super Tuesday was a pretty strong demonstration of that, right, Domenico? Absolutely. I mean, the coalitions with these two candidates are so clear and distinct. When it comes to age, there's no sharper division. And, you know, young voters under 30, that's who Bernie Sanders promised he could turn out. And he hasn't really done that in this election. You know, polls in 2016 and this year, turnout as a share of the electorate, young voters was down in every single one of those states. But you had Joe Biden winning older voters by a huge margin with Bernie Sanders consolidating the young vote as it exists, with Joe Biden consolidating support among older voters, that means there's a really fierce battle for those folks in the middle, those voters who are between the ages of 40 to 65 that we don't talk about as much.

I think whoever wins them, that could be significant in this election. All right, those were the numbers from last night. And when we come back, we're going to take a look at what's coming up next in the races in the coming week. Support for NPR and the following message come from Delta Airlines, who believes that the more you go out and see the world, you'll find that there is more that connects us than divides us. You may be on one end of the country or the other side of the world. You may be a lawyer, an activist, or a dairy farmer, but we can all agree that three-day weekends rule. Cooking for your loved ones brings you joy,

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But before we move on to all the things that are coming, we need to take a pause and we got to talk about delegates because we don't really know exactly who has how many delegates we are. We're waiting for totals to come in. And Domenico, I'm hoping you can explain to us a little bit about why that is and why delegates matter. Because delegates are what picks the winner in this race. And, you know, that's the real key here. And it's a little bit complicated the way Democrats do it because they try to be proportional. They don't do a winner-take-all system the way Republicans do. They try to have the vote share essentially match how many delegates somebody winds up getting to go to the convention. So the one wrinkle, though, is that anybody who gets below 15% gets no delegates.

And it's not just so cleanly as, oh, they got 14% statewide. It means they got no delegates. Well, in some of these states, you might look, for example, Elizabeth Warren got some delegates in places where she was below the 15% threshold statewide. That's because she won above 15% in various congressional districts in each of those states. And that's how they're apportioned out. All right. So let's take all of that math and the way the apportionment works and look ahead to

next week, because if this week was super, next week is big. So we have Big Tuesday coming up. That was well done, because I'm not so certain about the title of this, but we're going with it. Yeah, we are owning Big Tuesday. It is coming. And how big is Big Tuesday? How many states are we looking at and which ones are up for grabs? There are six states

that are voting, Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington State. The two biggest prizes are Michigan and Washington State. Michigan's got 125, Washington State 89, nowhere near the size of what we just saw on Super Tuesday. But what's going to be important is, again, that word momentum. Bernie Sanders really needs to run up the score in a place like Michigan to show that he's got some momentum to be able to blunt what a lot of people think will be advantages that Joe Biden has in some of the states coming up like Florida and Georgia later in the month. All right. We talked a lot about those demographics, about where Sanders wins. Are these states places where Sanders wins? Tell me about the demographics and where each person can play best. Sure, sure. So the fact of the matter is that the calendar doesn't get easier for Bernie Sanders in this coming week. Of course, the big prize on Big Tuesday, as I guess we're calling it, will be in

Michigan, where Bernie Sanders had a major upset four years ago over Hillary Clinton. And this party's been obsessed with the idea of electability. So when you're thinking about those general election prospects, Michigan will be huge. I think we're going to hear Bernie Sanders try to talk a lot about trade, talking about how he is uniquely qualified to defeat Donald Trump and win back some of those disaffected white working class voters that we talked about so much in 2016. My home state of Missouri also votes on Tuesday. Sanders lost that state in 2016 by less than a percentage point. It's going to be another test of both Biden and Sanders support among black voters, but in the Midwest. And again, the black vote is not a monolith. So you're going to see some different issues pop up there. And black voters make up about a fifth of Democratic turnout

in that state. Domenico mentioned Washington state, which I also think is going to be really interesting for Bernie Sanders. They, like a number of other states, have switched from being a caucus state to a primary state. Sanders has been seen as the favorite in some of the polls that we've seen. But that means that because of the way that they're doing their elections, he won't have as easy a time piling up the delegate margins in the same way he did in 2016. So things look a little bit more challenging for him. I think we're going to see him be incredibly aggressive competing in these states and states that come later on March 17th that have more sizable shares of delegates at stake to try to get a foothold and to leapfrog ahead of Joe Biden. All right. We're going to have to leave it there for today. But that big Tuesday is not too far away. And before then, we'll be back tomorrow at our normal time 5pm.

Till then, join us on our Facebook group. It's a place to talk about politics with other fans of the podcast and ask us questions. Head to n.pr slash politics group and make sure you answer those questions so that you can join the group. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And cover Congress. I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.