Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren are in big trouble as early Super Tuesday reports show their candidacies falling flat.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders challenged the Massachusetts senator on her own turf by holding multiple rallies in the state in the days before Super Tuesday. But it was Joe Biden leading the state at 33%, with 28% of precincts reporting. Sanders is in second with 25%, and Warren is in third place with 21%.
The New York Times projects that Warren and the billionaire former New York City mayor will be around 400-plus delegates behind Sanders and Biden after final tallies.
Bloomberg said earlier on Tuesday that he has “no intention of dropping out,” but his team reportedly plans to “reassess” his campaign on Wednesday. He is facing pressure to drop out of the race to prevent splitting the centrist vote between him and Biden, which risks giving socialist Sanders a path to earning a plurality of delegates.
Beating Bloomberg and Warren is another sign that Biden’s victory on Saturday in South Carolina, followed by the quick endorsements of former rivals Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke, gave a serious boost to what had been a flagging campaign that many people were already writing off. News organizations called Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama for Biden just seconds after polls closed, indicating that his wins were by such big margins that they could not be in doubt.
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Results from 14 states plus the territory of American Samoa on Tuesday account for 1,344 pledged nominating delegates, about one-third of the total. A candidate needs a majority of 1,991 pledged delegates to win the nomination on the first Democratic National Convention ballot and prevent a contested convention. In the event of a brokered convention, about 770 automatic superdelegates, party leaders such as Democratic National Committee members and Democratic members of Congress, are permitted to vote for whomever they wish.
Delegates are allocated based on the proportion of statewide votes and votes within congressional districts (except for Texas, which allocates district delegates based on state Senate districts rather than congressional districts). Candidates must obtain 15% support statewide or in at least one district to earn delegates, meaning that a candidate could pick up some district delegates even if they do not capture more than 15% support statewide.
Polls have not yet closed in California, which has the most delegates of the Super Tuesday states at 415. They close at 11 p.m. EST (8 p.m. PST).
About 40% of California’s primary electorate votes absentee by mail, meaning that Biden’s wave of endorsements from former rivals on Monday could have a smaller effect there.
Mail-in ballots could also delay declaring a winner in the state’s primary. The last ballots are expected to arrive in mid-March.
