Today, Explained - Thanks, Obama

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Vox's Andrew Prokop runs through Super Tuesday results, before Laura McGann explains Vice President Biden's "Joementum." (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday. It's still early, but things are looking awful, awful good. Andrew Prokop, Vox, it's Tuesday Explained. We're here in the studio in the middle of the night, Tuesday night. We know the song. We know the stakes. We know what to do. Let's go through it all.

What's the biggest takeaway from Super Tuesday 2020? The biggest takeaway so far, I think, is Mike Bloomberg's stunning win in the American Samoa caucuses could be a real game changer for his campaign. Ouch. Harsh. Wasn't Tulsi supposed to win American Samoa? Doesn't she have like a connection there? Yeah, Tulsi was born there. So the second place finish for her was a bit of a disappointment considering her home island advantage. Maybe she should have run as a Republican. But seriously, what's the major takeaway here?

It's clearly a good night for Biden. He won the most states. He has solidified his claim as the Democratic establishment's candidate in the race. And it's basically going to be him against Bernie going forward. Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren did not do well at all tonight. And the future of their campaigns is in very serious question. It seems that for all intents and purposes, this is a Biden-Bernie race. Let's talk about what we know at this point, region by region, starting with the Northeast, which is, of course, where Bernie's from. It's where Warren's from. How'd the vote shake out there? Biden ended up surprisingly winning Massachusetts, which is Warren's home state and a neighboring state to Bernie Sanders' Vermont.

Bernie, of course, won Vermont, his own home state, handily, though it appears that Biden will meet the minimum to get at least some delegates there. Last time around, Bernie won 100% of Vermont's delegates. So it is at least a little nice for Biden to pick up a few in Sanders' territory. And a bit of a bummer for Bernie. Exactly. And in other bad news for Bernie, there is Maine. That is a state that Bernie won last time around. At the time we're recording this, it hasn't been called.

But Biden being competitive there is bad for Bernie. What about the sort of Midwest, Western grab bag states, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah? What happened there? So Bernie did well in Colorado and Utah. He did well in both of the states in 2016. So that was expected. In Colorado, especially, that's a state that uses mail voting. So it was less vulnerable to a last minute swing of the type that we may have seen toward Biden in some other states. Then Minnesota is interesting because it was expected to be Amy Klobuchar winning there with Bernie in contention for second place.

But of course, Klobuchar dropped out, endorsed Biden, and lo and behold, now it is Biden that has won Minnesota, which is also a state that Bernie won in 2016. So that's a bit of a blow to Bernie. Let's move to Virginia and the South where Biden was favored, yeah? Yeah, so Biden was expected to win in many southern states, and we have seen very strong results for him across the South. Most impressively, massive wins in Alabama and Virginia. Also solid wins for Biden in Tennessee, North Carolina, and he won Arkansas and Oklahoma as well.

Which gets us pretty close to Texas. Who messed with Texas most? So Texas ended up being close. This is maybe some of the better news for Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton won Texas big in 2016. She beat Sanders by over 30 points there. And unlike the rest of the southern states, the outcome in Texas was close. But in the end, Texas was called for Biden. It's the second most populous state in the country. So definitely a significant win. And the other big state, of course, tonight is California, whose polls closed the latest and will take the longest to find out what happened. But we established on Monday that California is a huge player here, kind of returned to the fold this Super Tuesday.

Do we have any idea how that's looking? So far, it is looking like on a tough night for Bernie Sanders, California is going to be the bright spot. Based off of Bernie's performance in the exit polls, the AP called it for Bernie pretty quickly. But the margin in California can change a lot over days and even weeks as a ton of different male ballots are painstakingly slowly counted. Male ballots are such a pain. That's why I prefer female ballots. That's sexist, Sean.

Couldn't help but notice that you didn't really mention Michael Bloomberg at all except for American Samoa. Is he going to drop out? Is this like the end of his race? So it was reported that Bloomberg is going to reassess his campaign on Wednesday. He might realize that he's mostly sapping support from Biden because more of his voters would probably pick Biden over Sanders as their second choice. I think he's going to have to ask himself some tough questions about the future of his campaign and dropping out certainly seems like a distinct possibility. What about Elizabeth Warren? It wasn't a great night for Elizabeth Warren either. She didn't win anywhere. Doesn't seem like she is going to end up with too many delegates. And, you know,

it raises questions about what her prospects are going forward and what she is hoping to achieve at this point. After having lost her home state, Massachusetts, and failed to gain much ground anywhere else, I mean, she is going to have to make up her own mind about what she sees the future of her campaign is. So at the end of the day, a big night for Biden, a good night for Bernie, and the race is basically between those two guys now? That's certainly what it looks like. And in the end, Zero Dark Wednesday, can we say who won Super Tuesday? It certainly looks like Biden at this point. But my caution would be that we really have to see exactly how the delegate count shakes out.

There's obviously a lot of excitement and enthusiasm among Biden's team about his comeback, about the fact that he's won the most states here, about the fact that Sanders was expected to do quite well on Super Tuesday and is way under those expectations. But how it translates into the delegate count, it does not seem like this will be a knockout blow for Biden against Bernie Sanders. It looks instead like it will be a split, but Sanders, in the speech he gave on Super Tuesday night.

One of us in this race led the opposition to the war in Iraq. You're looking at him. It sounded like he very much wanted to press forward and draw some very tough contrast with Biden. Another candidate voted for the war in Iraq. So I would say that this race is definitely not over yet. Bernie is going to keep contesting these contests for the foreseeable future.

Now, we have a lot of other big states that are coming up in the next two weeks. By the time that they're over, about two-thirds of the total delegates in the Democratic contest will be allotted. So one candidate could build a large, large lead by the end of that, or it could still be close and a muddle and Bernie and Biden could be battling this out until June.

Vice President Joe Biden went from being the inevitable candidate to sort of an afterthought. And now back to flirting with inevitability again. We'll talk about how that happened and how he might fare against President Trump after a break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained.

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Joe Biden. A couple of weeks ago, it looked like he was down for the count. He had some really embarrassing losses in early states. And then recently, he's become much more popular. CNN projects that Joe Biden is the winner in South Carolina. This is the former vice president's first primary victory. He was counting on South Carolina to help keep his campaign going. He's having a bit of a surge moment thanks to a lot of big time Democrats

throwing their weight behind him. I'm looking for a leader. I'm looking for a president who will draw out what is best in each of us. And I'm encouraging everybody who was part of my campaign to join me because we have found that leader in vice president, soon to be president, Joe Biden. Two of his main competitors, Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor from Indiana, and Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, both announced that they were backing out of the race pre-Super Tuesday and that they were instead throwing their weight behind him. If you feel tired of the noise and the nonsense in our politics, and if you are tired of the noise and the nonsense in our politics. And if you are tired of the extremes, you have a home with me. And I think you know you have a home with Joe Biden.

And this was a pretty big deal because they were really vying for the same sort of space that he occupies, a sort of more moderate position vis-a-vis Bernie. How surprising was it that some of these people who we've seen time and again on the stage presenting a clear opposition to Joe Biden are all just so quickly falling in with him? It feels like a big tidal wave that, I don't know, most people didn't see coming. Is that how you saw it? It definitely felt surprising to me. And I think that the reason why it was so surprising is that this year we've seen this kind of almost extreme standoffishness

of the Democratic establishment in terms of getting involved in the primary. I think there's sort of latent PTSD from 2016 over the party not wanting to look like it was over intervening in the primary. There was this kind of almost overcorrection amongst kind of party leaders and big Democrats over endorsements. And so then the same sort of Democratic leaders in the party are watching this field going, OK, you know, Bernie Sanders is a self-identified socialist. We are Democrats. We would like to run a Democrat against Donald Trump. We would like to run a Democrat who we think would be good for down-ballot Democrats. And the moderate lane is in total disarray. The vote is being split amongst a group of candidates.

We've got to get it in order. And Joe Biden is our best shot. Do the endorsements make a difference? I know they say that there was, you know, a critical endorsement in South Carolina that helped Joe Biden win. Do all these Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg type endorsements make a break for Biden? That's one of those things that we'll have to kind of look back and, you know, I'll be interested in what political scientists tell us in a few years about that and, like, run the numbers.

But certainly what you can say is you want good buzz heading into a big election. And Joe Biden was short on cash heading into Super Tuesday. And what these endorsements did is it got him a lot of free media, like earned media is the lingo. And so he got a lot of great positive coverage that he didn't have to spend a dime on. I'm glad this coverage will come out after a lot of the voting so that we're not going to play into that. We'll cut that joke. Biden talks a lot about unity and pragmatism and bringing the party together. But obviously a lot of Bernarders don't like Joe.

Will he win them over? Will they vote for him if he's the nominee? being liked by the far left is part of his campaign to the center and to moderate Republicans who he wants to have vote for him. It's not a bug in the system that Bernie Sanders diehards don't like Joe Biden and are loud about it. That's the whole point of the Joe Biden campaign is that he's operating in a different lane. If you go back and look at his role in the 2018 midterms, for example, it was a blue wave year in the House. And it was because Democrats in key districts were able to take back votes from Donald Trump. And in a lot of those places, Joe Biden was the only one they wanted to have campaigning for them, as in terms of a national Democrat.

Down in Alabama, Doug Jones, his campaign wanted Charles Barkley. That's terrible. And Joe Biden. He will bring a sense of treating everybody, everybody, not a joke, everybody with dignity and respect. This is the Joe Biden case, that he's saying Democrats who have won in places that Donald Trump previously won,

like Democrats who know how to pick up seats, they want Joe Biden. They don't want Bernie Sanders. And if Democrats are going to win in 2020, they need Joe Biden at the top of the ticket to be able to go into those places and win. Obviously, one reason Bernie gets a lot more attention than Biden, especially from younger voters, is because he's proposing more dramatic change to our systems, to our health care system, to our education system. What is Biden's platform? I feel like it doesn't get nearly as much attention as Bernie's. Yeah. I mean, Bernie Sanders has really redefined progressive politics and how progressives talk about politics and talk about their goals. And what's interesting is if Bernie

Sanders weren't in the race, if it were just Joe Biden, I mean, the headlines would be Joe Biden runs on most progressive platform in American history, that he is further to the left of any Democratic contender except for Bernie Sanders and maybe Elizabeth Warren, essentially. He's making the case to build on the Affordable Care Act. It would cost about $750 billion over 10, not $3 trillion, but $750 billion. It would get 99.9% coverage. Anyone who had no, who was, anyone eligible for Medicaid would automatically be enrolled in this option. He was the first senator ever to introduce a climate change bill in the Senate, ever. And you can look at any number of other issues from funding for public education has never actually met the standards that it's supposed to meet, like the federal government has not spent at the level that it is even supposed to spend. And so Joe Biden's education plan basically gets Congress, the Department of Education and other entities to spend at the level it's supposed to be spending and increase that for mentoring, be able to get paid for teaching

other teachers, bringing them along. Because, folks, we have to have you in the schools teaching, teaching, teaching. On gun control, he's always been aggressive on the Brady Bill. He's been an aggressive advocate for gun control reform. He also, I think, operates in an interesting space on criminal justice reform. He's been criticized for his participation in the passage of a bill in the 1990s that has been held up as an example of an explosion in mass incarceration in the United States, of criminalizing drugs, and creating all kinds of unintended horrible consequences, particularly for communities of color. So that is a legitimate criticism of Joe Biden. But certainly his plans moving forward and his record since then does show he has changed his position and that he is looking to make

significant reforms in those areas, which I think would be pretty well supported by anybody who's interested in drug reform and criminal justice reform. What are his other weaknesses? Obviously, he's not the best debater in the world. He has a proclivity for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But what are the more concrete weaknesses he might face? It's just sort of from a kind of demographic standpoint. He does not represent the future of the Democratic Party. He's old. He's white. He's male. And he voted for the Iraq war. Yeah. And then there's that. Trump would certainly love to lord that over Biden. I'd also add that pretty much every major Democratic

candidate who has been polled against Donald Trump wins. You put up a candidate, pretty much any candidate against Donald Trump, that candidate wins. Joe Biden has done just as well and actually in a lot of cases quite a bit better than other candidates. And unlike the other candidates who have been running in the primary, Biden hasn't just been running against his fellow Democrats. He's also really been running against Trump and winning for really almost a year. If you look back at what Donald Trump has been up to since really last spring, in which he's been trying to encourage foreign governments to investigate Joe Biden and his son, it's really all been about attacking Joe Biden, attacking his credibility, insulting him on Twitter when he can. And through all of this, Joe Biden has been doing just fine

in the polls. So that's another advantage for him as a candidate. What does it say that we're here after this historically diverse field that included, you know, white women, women of color, a gay millennial, a Castro, a guy with a colorful tie, that we ended up with what it's going to be like one of two white guys in their 70s running against another white guy in his 70s. With Biden especially, does he just win by like Obama default despite all the fresher faces? The primary system favors, I would argue, two types of candidates. One, candidates with high name recognition. So say someone who had been vice president for eight years or somebody who can really contrast themselves with the rest of the field. So Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist with far more distinct views than the rest of the field. So if you're, say, someone in between, you can't create a clear contrast with the rest of the field and you don't have extreme name recognition. You're kind of there in the middle. Like, what are you going to do? So I don't know that Joe Biden winning is

some kind of signal that the Democratic Party is pining for a return to the Obama administration in such a literal way, as much as it's not surprising that a candidate with high name recognition and a candidate who distinguished himself so clearly from a crowded field, that these are the candidates that are standing out. You can read much more about Super Tuesday and the 2020 race over at Vox.com. Results, platforms, the remaining primaries, all of it. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, and this is a wrap on Tuesday Explained. That's terrible.