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Normally, when an incumbent who is popular with his party is running unopposed in a primary — or when the opponents are fairly marginal figures most voters have forgotten actually exist — there's very low turnout for the incumbent. That was not the case with Donald Trump last week, on Super Tuesday. He had a blowout primary, with people turning out in unexpected droves to vote for him. Trump voters knew that their vote wouldn't matter in terms of Trump gaining the delegates for their state. They turned out to make a point: Trump's voters are wildly enthusiastic. They don't...

@Miles Parks- NPR Rep. Clyburn on NPR just now: "I think when the night is over, Joe Biden will be the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination... If the night ends the way it has begun" it's time to "shut this primary down," meaning the DNC should "step in" and cancel future debates. He says prolonging the primary process only makes it more likely that the favorite, Biden in his eyes, "gets himself into trouble" and hurts himself for the general election

With six states headed to the ballot box today,1 it’s once again time for FiveThirtyEight to freeze its forecast to see where things stand. Today’s contests are divided between those that former Vice President Joe Biden will almost certainly win (99 percent chance) and those where Sen. Bernie Sanders has a clearer chance. As the table below shows, Biden is a strong favorite to win four of the seven contests, including three of the four biggest delegate hauls: Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi, as well as North Dakota. But Biden is also a more modest favorite over Sanders in the other...

An oft-repeated adage claims the left falls in love — with ideas and personalities, probably — and the right falls in line. In short, it’s often asserted that the right is more disciplined, hierarchical, and mechanical than the left.Is it, though? After Super Tuesday, many such assumptions are under renewed scrutiny. For example, after Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg torched their millions, only a lunatic would claim money can buy everything in politics. Yes, that includes a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads, allegedly by someone sitting in Saint Petersburg, Russia.Likewise, the coalescing of the Democratic field behind Joe...

The data sites can give you electoral odds on just about anything but I haven’t seen them gauge the probability yet that Bernie will be out of this race 48 hours from now. It can’t be much worse than 50/50.Let’s start with Mississippi and Missouri: Missouri Results:Biden – 62Sanders – 32Warren – 4Gabbard – 2Mississippi Results:Biden – 77Sanders – 22Gabbard – 1N: 348 MO, 340 MS, fielded 3/4 to 3/7 text to web https://t.co/xRhHbK9P98— Data for Progress (@DataProgress) March 9, 2020 ‘Nuff said. Ed already wrote about how Washington state looks surprisingly close, which should’t be the case if...

Republicans are on a path to flip six congressional seats in California in November based on the primary results. Four additional seats are enough to make GOP candidates competitive. Democrats, on the other hand, don’t seem to have an easy path open to even one seat currently held by a Republican. California as a whole leans left, with Democrats holding 45 of the 53 congressional districts (two are vacant). The March 3 primary results, however, suggests the GOP may heal its loses from the 2018 midterms where Democrats flipped seven seats. The state holds “jungle primaries,” which means both Democrats...

Many voters in Texas’ Democratic primary on Super Tuesday had to endure long lines to cast their ballots. But in TExas one Democrat almost broke the record. A Texas man waited nearly seven hours to cast his Super Tuesday vote, then left to work his late shift at 1:30 a.m. He had no complaints. “It felt good,” Hervis Rogers told the Houston Chronicle Tuesday night. Rogers was the last voter to cast a ballot at that primary spot and he did so after the AP reported Joe Biden had already edged out Bernie Sanders in the Lone Star state. The...

The obvious news is that many voters, after staring into the abyss of Bernie Sanders’ socialism and seeing Fidel Castro looking back at them, are turning to Biden as their preferred candidate. Biden, after looking like a loser last week, is looking like a contender this week. The less obvious news, though, is that in many states there was a real fire among Republicans, even though Donald Trump is a virtually uncontested incumbent. People ought to be staying home but in several states they are voting for Trump in droves. The following data is from Decision Desk HQ, as of...

Post all Super Tuesday news, updates and results here.

With the results in from South Carolina, a strong case can be made that Tom Steyer has just concluded the worst campaign in the history of presidential politics. Steyer, the California-based founder of Farallon Capital and the co-founder of Onecalifornia Bank and Beneficial State Bank, became a household name – at least among those households with MSNBC – by being the single largest funder of efforts to impeach President Trump. After telling reporters in January 2019 that he would not seek the presidency, Steyer exercised his prerogative to change his mind and declared his candidacy in July. According to the...

SPARTANBURG, South Carolina — You go to a Bernie Sanders rally and expect to find the most fervent supporters of any Democratic candidate by far. I mean devotees—“Berners”—so committed they stage protests outside public officials’ homes in the middle of the night shouting warnings through bullhorns like they did last week in Nevada.But not in upstate South Carolina. At a rally in Spartanburg on the campus of Wofford College Thursday night, a surprising number of attendees weren’t yet sure who they’d vote for in Saturday’s primary election.There was the mixed-race couple and their six-year-old daughter who came to check...

I don’t know if there’s anything to say in this post that wasn’t said in yesterday’s post. Second verse, same as the first: It suuuuuure looks like the Biden comeback in South Carolina is real.Which is the opposite of what I would have expected after Bernie ran the table in the first three states. In particular, his surprising blowout in Nevada had every indication of Democrats nationally beginning to warm up to him and accept him as a viable nominee. South Carolina would be the fourth and final domino to fall, and that would be that. Instead Biden’s gone...

General weather for South Carolina on Saturday.

MOSCOW—The Russians were excited once again for a U.S. presidential election in which they could interfere to sow division and discord, but their excitement soon turned to dismay when they found an election already too chaotic for them to follow. “Everyone is ready to tear each other apart in the Democratic primary,” commented Aleksei Teplov, a Russian hacker. “It seems like if we tried to add any more chaos, it would just be a drop in the ocean.” Teplov described how anytime they tried to get people to turn against each other, it was always overshadowed by a grassroots campaign...

For a socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders is doing pretty darn well. He’s a millionaire, he’s got three houses (including a lakefront home with an acre of frontage), and he loves his private jets. Oh, but don’t ever — ever — ask Bernie about his 1 Percent status. On Saturday, a woman tried to do just that — and she got forcibly removed from a campaign event in San Antonio, Texas. The woman — who was wearing a Trump shirt — shouted repeatedly at Sanders about his jet travel, even as he droned on about climate change (Sanders supports a policy...

If Democrats hope to narrow the field in their presidential primary, they’ll have to look past Nevada’s caucuses. With a week to go — and with early voting set to start today — six candidates now poll in double digits in the latest Review-Journal/AARP survey. Bernie Sanders leads with 25%, but Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are not far behind, with Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar all getting 10% or more as well.Anyone else see the train wreck coming? Sanders led the pack with 25 percent of respondents expressing support, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden...

Thanks to a bill that former Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in 2017, California will hold its presidential primary election in March this year rather than June, giving the 2020 Democratic candidates an earlier shot at capturing the Golden State’s nearly 500 delegates. But U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters argues that her home state – the nation’s most populous, with nearly 40 million residents -- is still getting shortchanged when it comes to influencing which Democrat carries the party’s banner in presidential elections. “A lot of people have come to the conclusion that it should not simply be Iowa and...

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez on Wednesday said he wants to talk about caucus reform and review the status of the primary cycle to reflect a more diverse voter base and representative candidates. "I think the time is ripe for that conversation,” Perez said in an appearance on CNN. “I want to make sure that we reflect the grand diversity of our party in everything we do.” "The candidate who is going to win this race ... is the candidate who does the best job bringing together this entire diverse coalition of the Democratic Party," he said. "African American...

WMUR will have continuous updates of election results beginning shortly after 8 pm.

MERRIMACK, New Hampshire — Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg won the most votes in the tiny community of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire — traditionally the first place to vote after midnight in the New Hampshire primary. Bloomberg won two write-in votes in the Democratic Party primary, defeating Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had one vote; and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who also had one vote.