Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[F]or Bernie Sanders, Super Tuesday was not a disaster.
But it was pretty bad. He lost Massachusetts, a next-door neighbor, a state he hoped to win. It would be a bit much to call Massachusetts a “must win” state for him. But it was close to that, and the fact that he lost it to Hillary Clinton by only about 25,000 votes (roughly 2 percentage points) makes little difference.
In all, Sanders lost more states than he won. He fell farther behind Clinton in the delegate count. His path to the Democratic presidential nomination – never clear and wide – got noticeably narrower and clogged with more brambles.
But it could have been worse. He cruised in his Vermont home. He won the Oklahoma primary by an impressive margin. Though the final results will not be certain until the wee hours of the morning, he seemed headed for victories in the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses.
Good enough to stay viable.
But barely.
Not that Sanders was going to quit, no matter what happened. His remarkable fund-raising success – built on the enthusiasm he has inspired among some voters – is enough to keep him in the race at least until the next round of big primaries, perhaps until the last ones in June.
By winning three states other than his own, he avoided becoming a political laughingstock. He’s in the game. But this is a game with an official score – the delegate count – and he is way behind. He fell farther behind Tuesday because in most of the states he lost, he really lost – by almost two-to-one margins in Texas, Virginia and Tennessee; by almost three-to-one margins in Arkansas and Georgia, by more than three-to-one in Alabama.
It isn’t so much that losing by such huge margins is embarrassing. For the last few weeks, Sanders had hardly campaigned in those states, partly so that the defeats he knew were coming would not be so humiliating.
But Democratic nominations are awarded proportionately. The bigger a candidate’s margin in a state and in each congressional district, the more delegates that candidate piles up.
In those six Southern states, in which African-Americans dominate the Democratic primary electorate, Clinton piled up a passel of delegates. Though it will take until sometime Wednesday afternoon to compile the district-by-district totals and apportion those delegates, her margins in some of them would seem to have been large enough for her to have won all of their delegates.
Sanders may have done that in Vermont, where Clinton seems to be falling short of the 15 percent (Vermont is one Congressional District) needed to qualify for delegates.
But Vermont Democrats chose 16 convention delegates Tuesday. While Sanders was winning Oklahoma by 52-to-40 percent, that adds up to little more than an even split of the 38 delegates chosen by the primary voters. The same holds true in Colorado and Minnesota. At midnight, he was ahead in both states by not quite a 60-40 margin. That will give him more of their combined 143 votes than Clinton gets. But not many more.
In contrast, the six Southern states which Clinton swept chose 571 delegates Tuesday, and she won a large majority of them. She was already well ahead of Sanders by a count of 883 to 232. Most of that huge margin came from “superdelegates,” the elected officials and party leaders who are officially uncommitted. But even in pledged delegates chosen by primary voters, Clinton was ahead of Sanders before Tuesday’s voting. Now she is farther ahead, and approaching half the 2,383 needed for the nomination.
The Massachusetts results contained some specific bad news for Sanders. For weeks, he has been saying that he wins when more “working class” voters go to the polls. But in Massachusetts, Clinton seems to have won most of the industrial cities with their heavy populations of working-class white voters. Sanders did better in the more affluent suburbs.
This does not bode well for Sanders in states like Ohio and Michigan, where he needs the support of working-class whites to remain competitive.
Clinton trounced Sanders in the Boston area. She even won Cambridge. If Bernie Sanders can’t carry Harvard, he’s in trouble.
