michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: Joe Biden scores a lopsided victory in South Carolina, prompting Pete Buttigieg to drop out and potentially resetting the race for the Democratic nomination. Alex Burns on how Biden did it, and what his victory could mean for Super Tuesday. It’s Monday, March 2. Alex, let’s talk about what happened on Saturday night. I’ll tell you what happened to me. The polls closed at 7 p.m., meaning that’s when the results were supposed to start trickling in.

archived recording (george stephanopoulos) Good evening. We are coming on the air now with breaking news in the race for the White House.

michael barbaro

And I went to The Times homepage and the race had already been called.

archived recording 1 It is now 7 o’clock on the East Coast, and the Fox News desicion desk can now project — archived recording 2 CBS News projects — archived recording 3 CNN projects that Joe Biden is the winner in South Carolina.

michael barbaro

Which is a little strange.

alex burns

Well, that’s what happens when there’s really not much suspense involved on election night.

[music]

archived recording The fact that we could make a projection right as the polls closed, it’s going to be a significant win for the former vice president.

alex burns

We only see it in races where the people who make these analyses and assessments —

archived recording This is overwhelming what we’re looking at. We have talked —

alex burns

— believe that there is really virtually no doubt at all about the outcome, and, in fact, where the outcome looks like it’s going to be really lopsided in the direction of one candidate.

archived recording Numbers coming in, the raw vote total. But we can project that it is going to be big. It’ll be dominant.

alex burns

This was one of the biggest victories we’ve seen for any candidate in this campaign.

archived recording This was a blowout. And Biden is winning in almost every category.

alex burns

Biden carried the state by almost 30 percentage points, Bernie Sanders way behind with about 20 percent. Third place candidate Tom Steyer with 11 percent, and nobody else in double digits.

joe biden

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, South Carolina! [CHEERING]

michael barbaro

Dominant, dominant, dominant win.

joe biden

Thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic Party, we’ve just won, and we’ve won big because of you. [CHEERING]

michael barbaro

I want to break down exactly how Biden won so big. What actually happened in South Carolina in terms of who showed up? And for which candidate?

alex burns

So South Carolina’s primary electorate on the Democratic side is always majority African-American. And Biden carried black voters basically in every age group, especially older black voters, who he carried by an enormous margin. When you look at black voters who were younger, it’s somewhat more even — it’s a lot more even than with Bernie Sanders. But Biden’s still very much holding his own, which is usually not the case with Joe Biden and young voters. We also saw higher turnout, higher participation in the Democratic primary among suburban, moderate, white voters in South Carolina. They also favored Joe Biden. This was not a situation of the kind we’ve seen in other states where Biden does very, very well with African-Americans, much less well with white voters. In South Carolina, you were looking at an electorate that was largely African-Americans and moderate whites. And those two groups are very, very Biden friendly.

michael barbaro

So let’s start with the black vote. We had talked on Friday about how black voters have tended to align behind a single candidate — behind Barack Obama, behind Hillary Clinton — which helps explain why the black vote can become so decisive. But there was talk this year that there would be a more fragmented black vote, particularly along generational lines. It sounds like that’s not exactly what happened.

alex burns

Well, it’s not what happened in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders did not do a whole lot better with black voters in South Carolina this time than he did four years ago. And the question going forward is going to be whether Sanders can improve upon his performance with African-Americans outside the South in a way that right now it doesn’t look like he is doing in the South. It’s a more conservative black electorate in the South, although African-American primary voters everywhere do tend to be more moderate.

michael barbaro

And what is the significance of that high rate of white suburban turnout for Joe Biden?

alex burns

If Joe Biden is going to end up as the Democratic nominee, it has always been clear that he has needed to join his strong support with black voters with a couple other big constituencies in the Democratic Party, including a good chunk of white voters. He has so far done far better with less educated, lower income, and older white voters than with the sort of suburban soccer mom white vote that probably characterizes a lot of these suburban areas. If he can going forward think about the suburbs outside of large cities as places where he can do really well, and join that with his support from less affluent and perhaps more rural areas, as well as heavily African-American parts of the electoral map, that’s actually a pretty encouraging picture for Joe Biden nationally. He has been trying to make the case to Democrats in this race that he is the candidate who is best equipped to reassemble the coalition that has won them such a series of electoral victories in the Trump era, in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats pieced together strong turnout among their core base constituencies with moderate voters in those suburbs. If Biden can, week after week, point to the results of primary elections and say, look at what I’m doing. It’s what we did in the midterms. It’s what we need to do in November. That gives him a strong moral case to make for the nomination.

michael barbaro

So Biden’s basically saying, think of me like these House freshmen in the purple districts who won in 2018 and helped the House flip to Democrats.

alex burns

Right. And in South Carolina we saw the first real glimmers of hope that he might be able to do that.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

alex burns

The question is whether South Carolina is a turning point. And now that there has been a big win for a moderate candidate in a diverse state, whether that triggers a coalescing of moderate constituencies across the political map, or whether we are still going to see Bernie Sanders recording victory after victory on the strength of his very intense, hardcore coalition on the left, while the moderate vote remains splintered. Because in South Carolina, the moderate constituencies are really, really well aligned for Joe Biden. He is deeply familiar with the politics of South Carolina, has decades-long relationships with many of the most important political figures in the state. He’s not going to be able to say that everywhere. And what we will see as the primary proceeds is how much what we saw in South Carolina is a result of Joe Biden’s distinctive relationship with that state. And you can easily see the race reverting to the pattern that we’ve seen in other states so far, where Bernie Sanders has his very energetic plurality coalition, and Joe Biden is still jockeying for support against folks like Klobuchar, to some extent Warren, and, as of the next round of primaries, Mike Bloomberg.

[music]

Bernie Sanders has a huge head start organizationally, financially in a lot of the contests around the country. He has had the momentum from Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada at his back. Biden needs to turn around his campaign in a very, very short period of time. It’s not impossible by any stretch, but I don’t think that anybody close to Joe Biden looks at him today as anything besides something of an underdog.

michael barbaro

Mm. We’ll be right back. So Alex, let’s talk about how all of this helps inform what’s going to happen tomorrow, Super Tuesday. 14 states are going to vote on the same day. And if I’m not mistaken, something like 30 percent of that electorate will be African-American. First of all, what do you think matters about what happened in South Carolina in terms of what might happen on Super Tuesday?

alex burns

So the Super Tuesday map is enormous and enormously diverse. And there are states like South Carolina, where black voters could end up playing a decisive role. Up to this point, we have seen that electorate divided between a couple different options, most importantly between Biden and Bloomberg.

michael barbaro

And why are they choosing between Biden and Bloomberg?

alex burns

Well, especially older African-American voters entered this primary season really favorably disposed towards Joe Biden. You had this enormous reservoir of goodwill based on Biden’s service as Barack Obama’s vice president. And then he had a bunch of really weak debates. And he got clobbered in Iowa, and he got clobbered even more in New Hampshire. And suddenly, voters across the board, including African-American voters, started to wonder, is this guy really the strongest option for the general election? And at exactly the moment that those doubts were starting to really percolate in earnest.

archived recording A great president, and an effective mayor. Leadership that makes a difference. archived recording (barack obama) He’s been a leader throughout the country for the past 12 years, Mr. Michael Bloomberg —

alex burns

Mike Bloomberg shows up with $500 million in television ads, many of them showing him side by side with Barack Obama.

archived recording (barack obama) I want to thank the mayor of this great city, Mayor Bloomberg, for his extraordinary leadership.

alex burns

And talking about his record on issues like gun control that are very, very important to black voters in Democratic primaries. The hope for Joe Biden going into Tuesday is that those voters who were with him at the start, and drifted away, and were drawn in by Mike Bloomberg will look at his own win in South Carolina and at Bloomberg’s pretty rocky couple weeks on the trail and sort of go home. Right? And to look at Biden and say, you know what? I had my doubts about this guy. But there’s a reason I liked him at the beginning. And I’m going to vote for him now.

michael barbaro

So let’s talk about this white suburban voter that we’ve been discussing on Super Tuesday. This is someone who will be decisive in states like Virginia. Right?

alex burns

Right.

michael barbaro

And what’s the dynamic been there?

alex burns

So this is another constituency where at the start of the race Biden was doing pretty well in those areas. You’re talking about a sort of educated white professional class that certainly isn’t interested in Medicare for all, and definitely wants to beat Donald Trump. And if Joe Biden had come into this race as a swaggering, dominant front-runner and had blown away the competition in debates, I think he would be rolling in those areas. That’s obviously not what happened. And for most of the last year, you have seen those voters feel pretty drawn to a sequence of alternatives — Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, briefly Amy Klobuchar, even Kamala Harris when you look back to last summer. These are people who are looking for a winner. And they’re looking for somebody who’s not necessarily super ideological. And there is a hunger, I think especially among a lot of high information white voters, people who follow the news really closely, to sort of glom onto whoever the hot new thing is. That has been Pete Buttigieg for much of this race. Recently you have seen a lot of interest in Mike Bloomberg, people who just feel like they are new and different and look like winners. Right now, Biden has, again, a narrow window to look to those people and say, listen, your choices are me and Bernie Sanders. Who are you more comfortable with?

michael barbaro

I was on the subject of Mike Bloomberg. Ever since the results started to come in from South Carolina, it has occurred to me that Bloomberg’s original rationale for entering the race was that Biden had to collapse. And he was collapsing. Right? And he was doing very badly in those first few primaries. And the thesis for Mike Bloomberg was, the reason they keep spending all this money is to emerge as the alternative to Biden out of the ashes of the Biden campaign. But there are no ashes at this moment in the Biden campaign. He’s doing quite well. So is this a Super Tuesday in which Mike Bloomberg has no real rationale?

alex burns

Well, we’re going to find out on Tuesday. I do think his rationale is a lot more strained right now than it was a week or two weeks ago. You know, part of it is about Biden being more resilient than I think a lot of the Bloomberg folks expected. Part of it is about Bloomberg himself having had such a rough couple of weeks on the campaign trail.

archived recording This is how you describe your policing policy as mayor. Quote, “We put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods.” And you explained that is, quote, “Because that’s where all the crime is.” You went on to say, “And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them against the wall and frisk them.” You’ve apologized for that policy, but what does that kind of language say about how you view people of color or people in minority neighborhoods?

alex burns

Bloomberg had really set himself up as this imposing alternative for moderate voters, and for even non-moderate voters who are mostly just interested in beating President Trump. And a lot of those people saw him on the debate stage and concluded, this guy is actually not so imposing after all.

michael bloomberg

Well, if I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I’m really worried about, embarrassed about was how it turned out with stop-and-frisk. When I got into —

alex burns

And that probably needed to happen in order for Biden to make the kind of comeback that he is attempting now.

michael barbaro

OK. So tell us about the other key voters that we’re going to be seeing on Super Tuesday, the other demographics.

alex burns

When you look at the eastern and southern states, it is mostly about the moderate whites and African-Americans that we’ve been talking about so far.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

alex burns

And then when you start to move further west, that’s when Latino voters become extremely important, and Asian-American voters as well. The biggest states on the Super Tuesday map are Texas and California. And if any candidate wins either of those states, and certainly if any candidate wins both of those states, it gives them an enormous claim to lead the Democratic Party nationally. It potentially establishes them with a huge lead in the national delegate count. And right now, the only candidate who looks like they’re in a solid position to win both of those states is Bernie Sanders. Now, there is a strong case to make right now that someone like a Biden, or maybe even a Bloomberg has the chance to pull off an upset in Texas. That’s a state that has a more moderate electorate overall, where Latino voters are more moderate than they are in California, and where you do have a ton of those moderate, white-collar suburbs that are so wary of Bernie Sanders. When you move into a state like California, it is just a much, much more liberal primary electorate from top to bottom. And every poll that we have seen out of California so far has suggested that Bernie Sanders has a pretty solid, and maybe even dominant lead in the state.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

alex burns

So we could end up in a really unusual kind of situation on the night of Super Tuesday, where, for much of the night, it looks like Joe Biden or Mike Bloomberg or another candidate is doing pretty well, because of the makeup of the states that are in the Eastern time zone and the Central time zone. And then as we move closer to the West Coast, suddenly Bernie Sanders leaps out ahead and it becomes clear that actually he is the guy who has had the upper hand all along.

michael barbaro

And that’s what we will discuss at 4 a.m. with you on Wednesday morning.

alex burns

I’m looking forward to it.

michael barbaro

So Alex, what you’re describing, in the broadest terms, sounds like a Super Tuesday evening, in which as we move across the country from east to west, we go from states that are likely to break for moderates, and are more testing the question of Biden versus Bloomberg, than they are Sanders versus all the moderates left in the race. And then we head to states, as we head west, that are likely to break for Sanders and are demonstrating what sort of coalition he has built and how strong it’s going to be.

alex burns

I think that’s basically right. I think in the east there still is the dynamic of Sanders versus all the moderates. And the very fact that there is a realistic chance that Bernie Sanders can win states like Virginia and North Carolina is a testament to just how fragmented the moderate vote has been for most of this race. And it is entirely plausible that from start to finish on Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders dominates from coast to coast. That moderate voters in the east are split between Biden and Bloomberg, and moderate voters in the west are split between them as well. And Bernie Sanders, by varying margins, with coalitions from 25 percent of the vote to 40 percent of the vote, just dominates the night. That is a real possibility. It is also a possibility that Sanders is going to find that having a hardcore base that makes up about a quarter of the Democratic vote in a lot of these more moderate and diverse states is actually not enough to win in a scenario where somebody, most likely Joe Biden, has emerged as a standard bearer for folks closer to the political middle.

michael barbaro

That’s interesting. So the version of this, Alex, where Sanders essentially walks away with the nomination after Super Tuesday, is the version of this where the question facing voters of Biden versus Bloomberg actually costs both Biden and Bloomberg the win in the east and the south by splitting the vote. The version of this where it’s much less clear, and there’s really no clear winner coming out of this, is if Biden manages to pull together the moderate vote in those places.

alex burns

I think that’s right. I think we should think about Super Tuesday in terms of sort of two big questions. The first is, does Bernie Sanders become a dominant front-runner? Does he manage to just roll over the divided moderate wing of the Democratic Party and run up the kind of delegate lead that would make him a prohibitive favorite to go into the Milwaukee convention with a wide lead in the delegate count? If that happens, then everybody else in this race, including Joe Biden, is going to need to really assess what kind of path forward they think they have, and whether it’s really worth waging a 50-state war against Sanders in order to try to take away the nomination at a convention where Sanders will enter as the clear leader.

michael barbaro

Mhm.

alex burns

If the answer to that question is no — if Bernie Sanders is not an overwhelming favorite after Super Tuesday — then I think the second question is: Is Joe Biden the clear runner-up or the clear alternative to Bernie Sanders? Because that is what has eluded Biden and every other moderate candidate in this race so far, is a moment of clarity that signals to the entire country this is a two-person race between a left-wing candidate and me. Biden hopes that South Carolina has set that process in motion. It needs to come to fruition in very, very short order on Super Tuesday. And then, from there, this narrows to a Biden-Sanders race. And then the campaign moves to places like Michigan and Arizona and Georgia and Florida that will really test the mettle of these two guys as head-to-head candidates in states that are super important in a general election.

michael barbaro

Thank you, Alex.

alex burns

Thank you.

pete buttigieg

Today is a moment of truth. After a year of going everywhere, meeting everyone, defying every expectation, seeking every vote, the truth is that the path has narrowed to a close for our candidacy, if not for our cause.

michael barbaro

On Sunday night, during a speech from his hometown of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg said he was ending his presidential campaign because he was concerned about the impact of staying in the race.

pete buttigieg

We have a responsibility to consider the effect of remaining in this race any further. Our goal has always been to help unify Americans to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for our values. [CHEERING]

michael barbaro

Without mentioning Sanders, Buttigieg said it was time for the Democratic Party to coalesce around a single moderate alternative.

archived recording (pete buttigieg) We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart. We need a broad-based agenda that can truly deliver for the American people, not one that gets lost in ideology. We need an approach strong enough not only to win the White House, but to hold the House, win the Senate and send Mitch McConnell into retirement. [CHEERING]

michael barbaro

Buttigieg was the second Democratic candidate to drop out of the race since the South Carolina primary. Tom Steyer quit the race on Saturday night. We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today. Washington State has declared a state of emergency after multiple cases of the coronavirus were detected near Seattle, where a man died from the virus, becoming the first U.S. fatality from the epidemic. Researchers studying infections in Washington said that the coronavirus may have been spreading there for weeks undetected, raising the possibility that up to 1,500 people may have been infected.

archived recording (alex azar) We cannot make predictions as to how many cases we’ll have, but we will have more. And we will have more community cases. It’s simply just a matter of math.

michael barbaro

So far the United States has tested very few Americans for the virus. But during an interview on Sunday with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, said that testing would begin to dramatically expand.

archived recording (alex azar) In terms of testing kits, we’ve already tested over 3,600 people for the virus. We now have 70 — the capability out in the field to test 75,000 people. And within the next week or two, we’ll have a radical expansion even beyond that of the testing that’s available. archived recording In Washington State, places that have —

[music]

michael barbaro