Super Tuesday Awaits

The Democratic presidential primary will look very different after tomorrow, maybe the most important day of the entire nominating process.

Voters in 14 states and one territory, American Samoa, will head to the polls to hand out the largest delegate swath of any single day of the election season. More than a third of the total pledged Democratic delegates are up for grabs.

Put another way: For all the attention paid to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, Super Tuesday will hand out three times as many delegates as those four states combined.

It’s a big deal.

And the reason rests heavily with two huge states voting tomorrow: California, which will give out 415 delegates, and Texas, which will hand out 228.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been polling well in both places, but those surveys were conducted before former Vice President Joe Biden’s strong showing in South Carolina on Saturday (and before former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg suspended his campaign).

Biden garnered almost half of all the votes cast in South Carolina, and said yesterday that his campaign received an influx of fundraising as results came in.

“Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared this candidacy dead,” Biden thundered to a crowd in Columbia, S.C., Saturday night. “Now, thanks to all of you — the heart of the Democratic Party — we just won and we’ve won big because of you, and we are very much alive."

Sanders also touted his fundraising numbers yesterday, saying his campaign raised $46.5 million in February.

Demographics could play a role in how tomorrow plays out.

Half of the states voting have significant shares of African American voters, including Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee, and three have Latino populations that make up more than 20% of their electorates. Biden won 60% of black voters in South Carolina, according to exit polls, whereas Sanders’ win in Nevada was boosted by strong support from Latino voters.

Another thing to watch: the timing of results. As KQED’s Marisa Lagos reported, several Super Tuesday states rely heavily on mail-in ballots that take longer to count.

"We in California believe a complete and accurate count is always better than a fast count," state Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks told Lagos. "And so I think everyone has to walk into Election Day understanding that there will be a significant portion of the vote that is not available, that is not accessible, that cannot be counted on election night."

In 2018, it took weeks to call some congressional races in California and Arizona.

In many of the states voting, news organizations like The Associated Press will be able to use exit poll data to make projections before the official results come in, but the exact number of delegates each candidate receives may not be known until days later.

And that’s not a bad thing, voting experts say.

"I think it’s important for us to understand that democracy takes time, and to criticize the process for not being fast enough is vastly and fundamentally different in my view from criticizing the process for not being accurate or not being secure," said Kathleen Hale, director of the Institute for Election Administration Research and Practice at Auburn University. "The integrity of elections and the accuracy of them and public trust in them to me trumps a hard and fast reporting deadline every time."