Washington: Super Tuesday is the biggest day on the primary calendar, and the results seem very likely to reshape the Democratic presidential race in ways few could have predicted a couple weeks ago.
Here are the key takeaways:
BIDEN STORMS BACK
It is hard to overstate the speed and depth of the comeback of former Vice President Joe Biden. He was embarrassed in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and left many Democrats looking for an alternative.
A decisive victory in South Carolina left him buoyant but also highly vulnerable heading into Super Tuesday, with 14 primaries spread from Maine to California. He had little money and only limited organization in place.
Mike Bloomberg had placed a $500 million bet that Biden would falter. Bernie Sanders had built his own kind of firewall — not in a small state like South Carolina, but in the biggest of them all, California.
But Sander's perceived strength and Bloomberg's weakness drove many Democrats into Biden's arms. In a remarkable 24 hours, he secured the endorsement of three former competitors who appeared at show-of-force events in Dallas and he harnessed the elusive power of momentum.
Biden's night started with an emphatic, 30-point victory in Virginia, a state where the profile of the electorate includes many of the college-educated suburban voters who powered Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm elections.
He built on that throughout the night, in North Carolina, Minnesota, Massachusetts and across the South. His success fundamentally reset the race, with the contest almost certainly now between him and Sanders, who ran strong in the two largest states Texas and California.
They seem destined for a long, state-by-state fight defined by their starkly different visions of what Democrats need to defeat President Donald Trump.
Read: Biden wins Minnesota, surges in South; Sanders wins Colorado
SANDERS UNBOWED
Sanders claimed the night's largest trophy, California, a state where he had committed substantial time and effort, while Biden had only a minimalist campaign. It was a measure of how strategic the Sanders campaign has been, and why he remains so formidable.
It was also a place where he assembled a coalition that included young voters and Latinos, something he was able to do in Texas, the second biggest delegate prize of the night, as well.
Winning California was critical for Sanders, who had long held a strong lead in the polls there.
But he lost in a number of states his campaign had been banking on, from Minnesota to Massachusetts. The Sanders campaign has gambled that, with a divided electorate, he could use his unshakable base to power him to plurality victories across the country. That theory showed flaws on Super Tuesday.
And there were warning signs beyond his big losses in the south, a region where Sanders has always struggled. He lost Minnesota and Oklahoma, two mostly-white states that he won during his 2016 insurgent run against Hillary Clinton. That suggests Sanders is seeing erosion in his white support from his prior races. Even in his home state of Vermont, Sanders didn’t perform as well as he did in 2016.
Now Sanders finds himself in much the same place as four years ago, a defiant insurgent with passionate support facing off against the favorite of the party establishment.
His national footprint, loyal following and strong fundraising mean he’s still in a solid position despite the Super Tuesday bruising. But Sanders may need a different approach going forward other than railing against the leaders of the party whose voters will determine whether he’s their nominee.
(With inputs from AP)
