The NPR Politics Podcast - Super Tuesday: Biden's Surge Continues As Sanders Leads In California

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Joe Biden topped the polls in eight states on Super Tuesday, including surprise wins in Minnesota and Massachusetts. Bernie Sanders lead in four states, including California.As in earlier contests, exit polls show a sharp divide in the party: young and Latino voters overwhelming prefer Sanders, while older and black voters generally side with Biden.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, campaign correspondents Asma Khalid and Scott Detrow, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the 2020 campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm also covering that campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And the time now is 11.24 p.m. on Tuesday, March 3rd. Super Tuesday has nearly come and gone. And it was a good night for former Vice President Joe Biden. Just a few days ago, the press and the pundits had declared the campaign dead. And then came South Carolina, and they had something to say about it.

And we're told, well, when you got to Super Tuesday, it'd be over. Well, it may be over for the other guy. If that other guy is Michael Bloomberg, maybe. Biden won Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, Virginia, Massachusetts, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. That's according to the Associated Press. And then Bernie Sanders carried, according to the AP, California, Colorado, Utah and Vermont. Now, we are still waiting on two other states, Texas and Maine. And we are also waiting to really get the granular details about how many delegates are coming out of this, because this is not a winner take all situation.

Asma and Scott, where are you guys right now? Well, I'm in Los Angeles where Joe Biden spoke tonight, but I will warn you, his team is beginning to pack down the tables. The party is clearly has emptied out at this point. I'm with the Bernie Sanders campaign in Essex Junction, Vermont. The party is also over here too. They are breaking things down. We're not quite at that balloon popping at the convention moment yet, but you're going to hear a lot of noises behind the hospital. Well, and the parties are ending because these candidates are going to get right back out on the road again. This was a super night, but it's not over yet.

No, Big Tuesday is up next. There are contests all across the country, not as many as the 14 tonight, the 30% or so of total delegates. But the next two weeks are multi-state primaries. And by the end of the month, we're going to have a pretty good idea of how this race will likely stay until the convention. You know, what we were waiting to find out for tonight was whether this was going to be a long slog for delegates or whether Bernie Sanders would get the kind of delegate lead he needed to make it almost impossible to catch up with him before the Milwaukee convention. It looks like Bernie Sanders is not going to be turned into a prohibitive frontrunner tonight.

Joe Biden did about as well as his campaign could possibly have expected. This is now a two-man race. Very clear ideological contrast. Biden versus Sanders. That's the big takeaway from tonight. You know, the remarkable thing is that headed into this night, we had been talking for weeks about how Bernie Sanders' campaign had all this infrastructure. It had all this money. How Joe Biden was running on fumes. He didn't even have offices in some of these states. He had one field office in California. Look, historical rules only work till they stop working. Everything we thought we knew about campaigns, organization is important. Field is really

important. Grassroots enthusiasm, money that you raise, especially from the grassroots. Joe Biden had none of those things. Tonight was a test of the three M's. Money, Bloomberg had it. Movement, organization, Bernie Sanders had it. And momentum, that's what Joe Biden got from South Carolina. Tonight, we got to see what each of them were worth. And very surprisingly, momentum was worth an awful lot. And part of that is because Joe Biden is a known commodity. He was the former vice president. You know, I think if you're talking about any other candidate who had very scarce resources, very little infrastructure, it would have been impossible to pull off what Biden did tonight. But he is a known figure. And so he had a lot of earned media the last couple of days coming off of his, you know, very strong win in South Carolina and then

a slew of big name endorsements that he got, including some from his former presidential rivals. And so, you know, when I talk to people, they all knew Joe Biden. It wasn't the sense that they didn't know him. They had been unsure about whether they should cast their ballot for him, whether he would actually be the best candidate to take on President Trump. But we should remember, Joe Biden was the leader in these polls way early on in this campaign cycle before he wasn't. And when he had high name recognition, he was the leader in the polls. And when he had high name recognition, he had almost collapsed in the polls. Remember what we were saying last week? We said as long as the field of people who are trying to be the alternative to Sanders remains split,

Sanders has a pretty clear path. Guess what happened? The field coalesced behind Joe Biden. We have never seen people drop out this fast and coalesce behind Biden. We thought we were watching the same movie from 2016 where the Republicans could never get their act together to coalesce behind one non-Trump, you know, one alternative to Trump. Guess what? The Democratic Party made individual sacrifices, Buttigieg, Klobuchar. And that's what happened. Once there was one alternative to Bernie Sanders, we all knew that all of the votes against Bernie were bigger than the votes for Bernie. And this is what happened. And just going, I'm just thinking about it. When we taped the podcast yesterday, it was morning my time out in the western part of the country and the Klobuchar announcement had just happened. And it was just such a remarkable day to fly from state to state

following Sanders. And each time you landed and turned on your phone, there was another development, another coalescing around Biden. And it was just this remarkable day. And at the time, we thought like, oh, my God, does this change anything? Or is this just a blip that we thought would change everything and didn't because endorsements just haven't seemed to matter as much lately. And the answer tonight was just devastatingly clear from the Sanders campaign as Joe Biden marched across the country winning states, especially you knew it was going to be a bad night for Bernie Sanders early on when both North Carolina and Virginia, states that Sanders campaigned in a lot, were called by the Associated Press and other networks almost instantaneously when the polls closed. So new conventional wisdom

has been born before our eyes. Free media means more than grassroots organization. And half a billion dollars. And half a billion dollars. I want to key in on one state here, Virginia, where voter turnout absolutely exploded. It vastly exceeded the turnout in 2016 for the primary. And Bernie Sanders has been saying, he said it in his speech tonight, that when he has when there's strong voter turnout, when a lot of people show up, he wins. Well, when a lot of people show up, Democrats win. Tonight, the Democrat was Joe Biden. People are talking about a revolution.

We started a movement. We've increased turnout. The turnout's turnout for us. That can deliver us to a moment where we can do extraordinary, extraordinary things. The places where turnout surged, we saw it in South Carolina and we saw it in Virginia. Those are places where they turned out for Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders says that he can bring out this incredible

surge of young voters and that's how he's going to win and beat Donald Trump. We just haven't seen that surge of young voters in any state that has voted so far. Well, I think you're right in where it matters. Tiny little surges. Iowa, 18 to 29-year-olds went up 30%. Well, it's turning up in this way that matters less to Bernie Sanders' chances of becoming the next president. Massive rallies, 13,000 people in Massachusetts, 10,000 people in Minnesota, over and over again over the last few days. It was such a contrast to see. It seemed like the Sanders movement was swelling and swelling in terms of people who come up and are energized. And one interesting thing we noted tonight

was that as the evening went on and got worse and worse for Sanders, the supporters that Barbara Sprunt, our producer, who was out interviewing all night, got more optimistic. It's like they're comfortable fighting against everybody else, but an energized group of people is not enough when it's not the majority or more than the other candidates. You name two states there, Minnesota and Massachusetts. Those are two states where Joe Biden is projected to win. Which is phenomenal. I mean, you're talking

about Massachusetts. This is a state that he essentially really didn't campaign in at all. And we had a candidate in this race. We have still to this day, a candidate in this race who is the senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren. And look, you know, I've I've lived in Massachusetts. I have spent a long time reporting in that state. People, you know, overwhelmingly will say that they like her as their senator. You know, she has been a senator there since 2012. When she first entered this race, it didn't seem like there was a genuine consensus when I talked to folks that they wanted her to run. But it is still astounding to me that it was Joe Biden, who's the proclaimed winner, who did not campaign there. I mean, that's just

phenomenal. There will be college courses taught on the mysterious, utter collapse of Elizabeth Warren. It's incredible. She went from having the best stump speech, the best political skills, the best organization, to not winning anywhere even in her home state. And Elizabeth Warren was campaigning in Michigan tonight. She gave a speech well before many of the polls closed. And she was essentially saying that voters were behaving like pundits too much. But prediction has been a terrible business, and the pundits have gotten it wrong over and over. So here's... Here's my advice. I've got some advice that I want to start with tonight.

So here's my advice. Cast a vote that will make you proud. Cast a vote from your heart. And vote for the person you think will make the best president of the United States of America. Voters' voices are a heck of a lot louder than pundits. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more on the results and what they mean for Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren. Support for NPR and the following message come from Delta Airlines, who believes that the more

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TED Radio Hour. I am so excited because we are working on a bunch of new, amazing episodes. We're exploring big ideas about reinvention, making amends, and the psychological effects of climate change. Our first show drops March 13th. Please join me. And we're back. And I just want to talk a little bit more about California because it is this very big, very delegate-rich state where, according to the AP, Bernie Sanders has won it. What do we take from that? I mean, I guess it's not entirely a surprise that Bernie Sanders won California. It's not a surprise. He had made California central to his March 3rd strategy, and March 3rd was central to his entire campaign. So they spent a lot of time, a lot of resources. The best example of how important California was to Sanders is that

he made a decision to be the only candidate to skip the commemorations in Selma, Alabama this weekend in order to campaign in San Jose and Los Angeles. So Sanders won California, but the important part of that, we're not going to know for days, if not weeks, and that is what the margins were. Before Joe Biden came roaring back to life, the Sanders camp thought there was a real chance they could win by a big margin, keep all or maybe just all but one opponent under that 15% threshold and get an enormous amount of the 415 delegates in California. Given the way things have gone and given the fact that we saw a lot of data that early voting was lower than usual as people waited to make up their mind, there's a pretty good chance Joe Biden did better than expected. And it's more of an even type split. Let's just do a little explaining about delegate math. There's this 15 percent threshold for viability. If a candidate gets 15 percent, then they get delegates.

So if Sanders was the only one who got more than 15 percent, that would have been good for him. He would have gotten a larger share of the delegates. But if Biden, if Bloomberg, if Warren, and we really will not know for sure who makes the 15 percent threshold for a while, then that could cut into the lead in delegates that Sanders is able to get out of that one state. In addition to delegates, though, isn't it also the storyline that we begin to hear after Super Tuesday? And I will say already, the storyline seems to be that Joe Biden won a bunch of states, including some that he and his campaign didn't necessarily expect to win tonight. You know, Joe Biden, who's been so unlucky in his life and has had so many personal losses, has been incredibly lucky in the last week or two because he keeps on winning during prime time. In other words, the states he won were early in the evening.

So the storyline is Joe Biden wins again and again and again. And, you know, Scott just said something that I think is really symbolic of this race. Bernie Sanders skipped the Selma anniversary event. He was campaigning for Latino votes in California or wherever he wanted to go. Joe Biden has been getting big numbers with African-American voters. Bernie Sanders getting big numbers with Latino voters. So in this diverse coalition, that's the Democratic Party. They each have their own lane. Well, I think I think Mara's right. Just real quick caveat. This is an event that Bernie Sanders goes to almost every year. So that's why I'm not saying

black voters. I'm just saying. Yeah. But it was pretty surprising to not have Selma on the schedule. Right. The really interesting thing about the Democratic coalition when it comes to minority voters is Joe Biden has tremendous strength among African-American voters. He certainly owes them for his resurrection of his campaign. But Bernie Sanders is very strong with Latino voters. You saw that in Nevada. You saw that tonight. And he is particularly

strong with young Latino voters who find his calls for debt-free college, free community college, and free health care very appealing. And the states that are coming next have more African-American voters than Latino voters. I mean, the big states with big, huge Latino populations have now voted, Texas and California. That's right. And the battleground states in the general election, Democrats will depend much more on turning out African-American voters than Hispanic voters, even though Hispanic voters will eventually be a bigger share of the overall electorate. In terms of the battleground map, the states that are in play, African-American voters just

happen to be a more important chunk of the Democratic coalition. Asma Amara has been talking about Joe Biden and black voters. There was a question headed into Super Tuesday about whether Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, would be able to sort of cut into that support. It seems as though that didn't happen. I was in the church in Selma this past weekend. And what was remarkable to see was the stark difference in how Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg were received. So first, you know, the reverend kind of chided Bloomberg over the need for him to listen more to the African-American community. Then you saw actually people in the

pew, some of them turned their backs, they stood up and turned their backs as Bloomberg was speaking. You know, Joe Biden gets up, he has this huge reception, standing ovation from people there. It was just, to me, such an interesting difference because leading into Super Tuesday, there were questions about whether Bloomberg, because of some high profile AfricanAmerican endorsements, whether he would be able to peel away some of that black support. I think today makes it pretty clear that that did not happen the way it needed to for him. There is a long, rich tradition of New York City mayors, from John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani to Bill de Blasio, trying to run for president and spectacularly flaming out.

And I think with his more than a half billion dollars spent and the results tonight, Mike Bloomberg might now take the top prize in that in that Hall of Fame. Except for he still has what might be the highest and best use of Mike Bloomberg. He still might be a historic figure in this campaign because he has promised to spend whatever it takes, which could be many billions of dollars, on behalf of whoever is the Democratic nominee. Also, he won some delegates. He won American Samoa. So did Tulsi Gabbard. And also Tulsi Gabbard will get some delegates out, or at least a delegate, out of American Samoa. And he is polling above the 15% threshold in some states as well.

So he will certainly accrue delegates tonight. Sure. But for the money spent, these are not the results he was looking for. All right. Well, we are going to leave it right there because I think Scott and Asma are getting kicked out. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the campaign, too. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.