US Election: a Forensic Wednesday After Super Tuesday

The Sanders campaign gets shut out of the South, and the Biden second act lights up a route to the nomination.

After an enviable 72 hours of establishment option-weighing, endorsements and tactical withdrawals, Joe Biden was able to tear through the Super Tuesday primaries; there were the predicted Southern wins, nearly all sweetened by the size of the victories: at the time of writing, Biden had won 63% of Democrats in Alabama, 53% in Virginia and over 40% in North Carolina and Tennessee. In the six southern states, Bernie Sanders never got more than a quarter of the vote and Michael Bloomberg never made it to 20%. As mentioned in my last note, Biden’s approval from African-American voters is making him unassailable in the South. Major primaries are still to come in the region – Florida on March 17 and Georgia a week later – and Biden will have an increasingly clear run in them.