Polling out of the second-largest Super Tuesday state indicates that the fight to be a dominant front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary may go on well into late spring or early summer.
The latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll of Democratic voters in Texas shows a race where no candidate is close to earning a majority of delegates following the state’s primary on March 3. The poll found that Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont leads with 24% support, with former Vice President Joe Biden closely behind at 22%, Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 15%, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 10%.
Although Sanders’s support constitutes a 6-point jump since the last poll of the state was taken in January, he still remains far from collecting a majority of the delegates. Sanders’s current 24-point support actually represents a 2-point drop from a separate survey also conducted in the beginning of January.
Biden’s resilience in Texas despite handily losing the first two primary contests should give his campaign some confidence that the race remains tight. The fact that he’s no longer leading, however, is further evidence that his Southern strategy is in serious jeopardy.
“Most of the movement has been Sanders and Bloomberg, with Biden [holding] still,” said Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “To be unable to increase his vote share is pretty telling for Biden.”
The Super Tuesday map is near evenly split between Northern and Southern states. The demographics of states such as Minnesota and Colorado, with heavy pockets of urban liberals, already favored a candidate such as Sanders before he pulled off wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. But states with large black populations, such as Alabama and Virginia, were initially slated to go for Biden.
That no longer seems to be the case.
A principle reason former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was able to fend off Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary was her ability to win by double digits in the South. That cycle, Clinton earned 65.19% of the vote in Texas to Sanders’s 33.19% of the vote.
But the proportional awarding of delegates in this cycle’s primary means that it’s very likely that no candidate will emerge from Super Tuesday as a clear leader. As Iowa and New Hampshire have shown, a candidate such as former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg can receive thousands fewer votes than Sanders and wind up with more delegates.
That dynamic, particularly given that no candidate appears to clear over 50% in any large Super Tuesday state yet, will make it very unlikely that many candidates will drop out next month. Even after a third of all delegates have been awarded, it will likely be statistically impossible for any candidate to walk into the Democratic convention with a clear majority.
An electoral model by FiveThirtyEight put Sanders’s chances of earning a majority of pledged delegates at 38%, with a 52% chance of winning a plurality of delegates. Sanders’s clear path to a win still remains murky, with his base of support significantly contracting from his 2016 run.
Polls out of California show Sanders pulling away from the rest of the field, with one taken in late January showing Sanders at 30% support and Warren at 16% — but still far from the 50% he would need to emerge as a clear winner of the state.
