HOUSTON — It promised to be a nail-biter, and Texas didn’t disappoint.
Joe Biden eked out a win in Texas, the second-largest cache of delegates on offer this Super Tuesday, beating Bernie Sanders, the front-runner before the late consolidation of center-left support behind the two-term vice president.
With 79% of precincts reporting, Biden had 32.7% of the vote and 30-plus delegates to Sanders’s 29.2% and 23 delegates. Billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also viable with 15.6%.
Texas’s diverse population played to Biden’s and Sanders’s advantages, with Delaware’s 36-year senator and the Vermont senator appealing to black Democrats and Latino Democrats, respectively, in the growing urban centers of Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, and the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Biden, 77, had an edge in the state’s older, rural areas, while Sanders, 78, dominated in younger, whiter places such as Austin.
Heading into Super Tuesday, Biden closed the average polling gap between himself and Sanders, ending in the senator only having a 1.5 percentage point lead, 29.5% to 28%. Prior to those numbers and ceding California, his strategy had been to ensure simply that Sanders didn’t experience a runaway success in the state where he appeared near the end of the second page of the ballot.
Beto O’Rourke, El Paso’s favorite son, was among those who gave him a last-minute lift.
O’Rourke joined Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar in Dallas on Super Tuesday eve to endorse their former political foe publicly, capping a high-octane day of Democratic heavyweights coalescing around Biden to try to stop socialist Sanders from becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.
Biden campaign spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield described her boss’s performance as one of the great comebacks in modern political history, given his light schedule on the campaign trail, where he often would not draw huge crowds, and his limited advertising spending.
“He showed tonight that he is the only candidate that can put together the Obama-Biden coalition,” Bedingfield told CNN in the early hours of Wednesday morning, referring to former President Barack Obama.
Texas provided White House hopefuls with the opportunity to scoop up some of its 228 pledged delegates, with 1,991 needed to become the next Democratic standard-bearer.
