Joe Biden celebrating his Super Tuesday wins in one of the few places he lost.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
LOS ANGELES—Joe Biden was in California, but the minds of the people waiting to get into his Super Tuesday party at the Baldwin Hills Recreation Center were turning eastward. As they stood in line—just around the corner from Obama Boulevard in a historically black neighborhood—an NBC reporter informed them that Biden had already won Virginia and North Carolina, and the crowd let out a loud roar.
There did not appear to be a television for the public at the outdoor event, but news of Biden’s early results travelled quickly. “I’m very excited that they called North Carolina and Virginia as soon as the polls closed,” Dana Douglas told me as she stood in line. “I’m also excited that he appears to have exceeded the 15 percent threshold in Vermont and so he’ll get some of the delegates in Bernie Sanders’ Vermont.”
The results kept coming, across the South: Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, states that Democrats have not carried in decades, with Biden borne along by black voters as he had been in his dominant, campaign-turning victory in South Carolina on Saturday. The win in Virginia was particularly impressive with his vote share coming in at over 50 percent, around 20 points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders in second place. Sanders, whose frontrunner status in this nomination fight had become seriously challenged in a few short days, claimed his own early victory in his home state of Vermont. His strongest states, though, would not finish voting and report until later in the night.
Sanders campaign was eager to argue that the bias towards East Coast results might be exaggerating the strength of Biden’s Super Tuesday. Indeed, Sanders was declared the winner in Utah and Colorado, where he appeared headed for an impressive double-digit victory in a state that again seemed to showcase his strength among Hispanic voters. Texas and California, two of the country’s biggest electoral college prizes and two of Sanders’ strongest states in recent polls, hadn’t been counted when Biden’s string of victories were reported.
By the time that TV networks declared victory for Biden in Minnesota, a state that Sanders seemed to have a chance to win just a couple days ago but which pivoted hard after Sen. Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed the former vice president, it was clear that the Biden campaign would not be waiting for California or Texas to come in to claim the night as a win.
Indeed, Biden came out to address the crowd in Baldwin Hills 30 minutes before polls even closed in California, selling his Super Tuesday victories as a comeback narrative. “It’s still early, but things are looking awful, awful good,” Biden told his cheering supporters. “For those have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign. 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. So I’m here to report we are very much alive.” Soon after his speech, Biden was declared a surprise winner in Massachusetts—Sanders’ neighboring state and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s home turf.
When California’s polls closed not long after Biden’s speech, though, the Associated Press immediately reported it in Sanders’ column. Sanders wanted—and needed—as large a margin in California as possible to make up for Biden’s delegate haul in the eastern and central states, and his campaign successfully petitioned a judge for polls to remain open late to allow voters who were stuck in long lines in Los Angeles to vote. And despite the voting issues, Sanders had a particularly dominant performance in the state among young Hispanic voters, as he had in Nevada’s caucus.
Ultimately, Texas and California’s delegate hauls alone could keep Sanders in strong contention in the delegate and popular vote count, or even help him to maintain his lead in the former and move back ahead in the latter. Those final results were still being counted late into the night on Tuesday, though, and may not come until much later.
In the meantime, Biden’s crowd of several hundred supporters in Los Angeles were celebrating. “It’s been an incredible last 72 hours where he was to where he is now,” said Ethan Titelman. “I think the party’s finally taking things really seriously and coalescing around what I think is the candidate with the greatest chance of winning the election in November.”
Titelman hadn’t settled firmly on Biden until after South Carolina and said he liked nearly everyone in the race. “I was at one point in time considering everybody except for Bernie Sanders,” he said.
“I think that shows that he has the broadest coalition,” Titelman said of Biden’s victories in Massachusetts and Minnesota. “He’s able to win Northern states, he’s able to win Southern states. States with large minority populations and states without.”
He had just started volunteering for Biden, he said, but was struck by his lack of campaign structure in the Golden State. “I started this weekend, after South Carolina, literally on Saturday, I saw that he was winning, how much he was winning, I went to the office, but nobody was there, it was pretty unorganized,” Titelman said. “So, I’m hoping that this can help build his organization to the level—I mean, look at the attendance here, it’s probably one percent of what a Bernie rally would be?”
Things seemed chaotic at points in the rally, with security seeming to be non-existent and two anti-dairy protesters crashing onto the stage near the start of Biden’s speech and accosting his sister Valerie and his wife Jill.
It’s unclear whether Biden—who has raised $15 million in the first few days of March alone—will begin to build the kind of campaign infrastructure that can compete with the well-funded Sanders campaign in the states ahead. Based on his results, it seemed he might not need it.
Titelman even believed that Biden’s most noticeable weakness—his struggles crafting together coherent sentences—would not actually hamper him in a race with Trump.
“I mean look, we have a president in the White House who can barely speak English as well,” he said. “So I think the old rules have changed.”
Tyrell Pickett, a younger voter who said he supported Biden for his work on Obamacare and LGBTQ issues during the Obama presidency, also suggested Biden compared favorably to Trump when it came to verbal miscues. “Trump’s mouth has no filter at all,” Pickett said.
When asked about Biden’s misstatement during last week’s debate that 150 million Americans had been killed by gun violence in recent years, Pickett said that he felt it spoke to a larger truth. “Joe, he spoke the truth. There’s a lot of violence going on [and] something has to be done about it actually,” he told me.
Douglas, who is gay and said she supported Biden because “he pushed Obama to be in favor of marriage equality,” also offered another reason for supporting Biden that comes up a lot in conversation with his supporters.
“I think we need someone who can bring the country together and I think it’s a very bad idea to lurch forward from one extreme to the other where the winner tries to dominate the loser,” Douglas told me.
Titelman made the same argument. “I see this election as sort of like hitting the reset button, and that’s my issue with Bernie, it’s sort of seems like if he were going to win it would be a hard turn and then it’s just going to turn the other way, the pendulum’s going to keep swinging,” he said. “Maybe Joe can help find a center in this country and start anew.”
Kidist Berhe, an Eritrean refugee who was at the Biden event with her baby, said something similar. She had not been active in politics in the past, but she said she was there to support Biden because she felt “it’s important” this time.
She liked Biden because, having grown “with kind of mass war” in her home country, the current instability in this country was upsetting to her and she was looking for something calmer. “It bothers me,” she said. “I can’t even listen to the news.”
“President Trump,” she concluded, “has to be out.”
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