Super Tuesday just changed everything for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders

| 10:07 pm EST March 3, 2020
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We still have a long way to go tonight with Super Tuesday results. The majority of the states haven’t even been called yet. But among the states that have posted results, the trends are clear – and eyebrow raising. It’s already clear that no matter how the particulars of the rest of the night play out, this entire race has just been upended.

Bernie Sanders is likely to win California, where he’ll pick up a majority of the huge delegate haul. The only question is how large or small that majority ends up being. Texas will be a close race, meaning that no matter who wins, Sanders and Joe Biden will win a roughly equal number of delegates there. The real news is what’s going on everywhere else outside those two states.

No one is surprised that Biden has won North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama. What does jump off the page is that Biden is winning these states by huge margins, when some of them were supposed to have been close. The AP just called Minnesota for Biden, which is stunning, because he was in a distant third place in the state just a few day ago. The partial results show Biden having a chance to win Massachusetts and Maine, two states where no one was expecting him to be particularly competitive.

Joe Biden is running up the score right now. Again, while the media will pay a lot of attention to who wins Texas, the close result and proportional delegate allocation there mean that the outcome won’t impact the math much either way. Bernie Sanders still has a chance to wipe out Biden’s big lead by dominating in California, and a chance to come out of Super Tuesday with the most delegates overall.

But the worst case scenario for Joe Biden is that he comes out of Super Tuesday roughly tied for the delegate lead (or slightly behind), with the race then shifting to states like Florida and Georgia, where he’s likely to win big. The best case scenario for Biden is that he takes the overall delegate lead tonight, which no one – including me – saw coming.