With Super Tuesday’s count is in progress, its muddle slowly clarifying with hours before California begins to come in and days before all of it will be tallied because there are 2 million early votes in the Golden State to be unsealed and counted in the days ahead, what can we deduce?
First, enormous turnouts in most states, maybe all 14 of the Super Tuesday states that portend?
That portends if you are a Republican you better wake up and smell the roses or, more likely, reach for the smelling salts because you are headed to a catastrophe come election day in November alike to your party’s 1964 debacle, the year of Goldwater and the daisy ad. And you must know if you have any sense, why it is going to happen and that it will be entirely well deserved.
Nothing should more alarm Republicans than a galvanized, aroused, unified black vote combining with an alarmed, aroused united, new Democratic white suburban women’s vote. That may be a political oxymoron but whatever else it is, it is a hard left/right hook tattoo in politics.
What could that mean? Joe Biden in the White House; Democrats gaining 10 to 20 seats more in the House; and winning Senate seats in Colorado, Georgia (not one but two there), and in Arizona, Maine, maybe Iowa and, crazy as it sounds, Texas and South Carolina, producing — net of the loss of Doug Jones’s seat in Alabama (got to be realistic) — a 52-46 Democratic Senate.
If no one in Washington would give you odds on that tonight (and they wouldn’t.) I would.
If it’s Sanders, the result likely is the reverse: Trump in the White House, McConnell remaining majority leader of the Senate and, worst of all, Democrats losing the House. That is not a possibility. In politics numbers are immutable. It is a likely certainty.
So the likelihood of a big Democratic year is one of two things emerging even early on Super Tuesday night.
The other is that we will all know March 18 whether Biden can win this outright on the first ballot or if it is going to a second ballot and perhaps beyond.
Why? Because even now this early as it is shaping up, the Democratic contest does not point to anyone getting to 1,991 delegates on the first ballot but very probably to a first-ballot leader topping out at about 1,700 if Bloomberg and Warren win delegates and stay in the contest.
Understand too that next Tuesday, one week from now, six more states, among them Michigan and Missouri, hold primaries and that just two weeks from now, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, four more hold primaries including Illinois, Ohio and Florida – Florida the third-largest state with 25 million people.
By the close of voting March 17, 60% of the Democratic 1st ballot delegate vote will have taken place and 60% of 1st ballot pledged delegates will be chosen — chosen by voters not by some mythical establishment out to thwart Sanders.
One thing for certain is that a black voter in South Carolina is not a member of any establishment. She is most likely a church-going, hard-working socially moderate, economically disadvantaged woman and to accuse her of being part of an “establishment” plot to deny Sanders the nomination is disqualifying foul.
Then if by March 18 no candidate is within reach of closing out to 1,991 delegates, assuming four candidates continue, then it will be all but mathematically impossible for someone to win on the 1st ballot given the 15% proportionality in district, at large and PLEO delegate slatings under Democratic Party rules – rules Bernie Sanders pressed for after 2016.
So the bottom line, the takeaway, whatever cliche you want to use is that what is shaping up tonight, albeit with California yet to come and Texas still taking shape, is this: If four candidates have delegates and stay in the contest, it will go to the convention where, in the end, Bernie Sanders will not be nominated and Joe Biden will be (providing they stay alive at their respective ages of 78 and 77).
Peeling the Onion 