A week ago, his White House dream was on life support, but Joe Biden roared back on Super Tuesday — putting presumptive front-runner Bernie Sanders on notice with victories in at least nine of 14 states and even pulling off an improbable, Texas-size upset in the Lone Star State.
“They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing!” crowed the jubilant former vice president at the Baldwin Hills Recreation Center in Los Angeles.
A cumulative 1,357 delegates were up for grabs on the most jam-packed day of primary season, which spread across 14 states that stretched from coast to coast and included American Samoa.
Maintaining the momentum of his campaign-saving victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, Biden got off to a strong start with an early win in Virginia on Tuesday, and topped it off around 2 a.m. Wednesday with his biggest prize, Texas.
Pollsters had predicted that the state, with 228 delegates, would be carried by Vermont Sen. Sanders.
“Those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign!” Biden said. “Just a few days ago, the press declared the campaign dead. And then came South Carolina. And they had something to say about it!”
In addition to his triumph in Texas, Biden played the victorious underdog in Massachusetts and Minnesota, home to 91 and 75 delegates, respectively.
His win in the Bay State was a crushing blow to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who placed a disappointing third on her home turf — a result that pushed her already fading campaign to the brink.
To win the state, Biden also fended off Sanders, whose far-left politics align much more closely with Warren’s.
Meanwhile, pundits had projected that Sanders would sink Biden in the Land of 10,000 Lakes after Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced the suspension of her foundering campaign on the eve of Super Tuesday.
But, perhaps due to Klobuchar’s endorsement, Biden managed to pull off the upset in a state where he had invested virtually no campaign resources.
The unexpected twin wins in Massachusetts and Minnesota were the cherries on top of the cake for Biden.
Within seconds of the polls closing at 7 p.m., Virginia, home to 99 delegates, was called for Biden. He tallied 53.2 percent of votes in the Old Dominion, more than doubling Sanders’ 23.1 percent, with 99 percent of precincts reporting.
The blowout was more than just a moral victory for the Biden camp, as delegates are dished out not on a winner-take-all basis, but in proportion to vote totals to any candidate who clears a 15 percent threshold.
To clinch the nomination — and avoid a contentious brokering process at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in July — a candidate must get the backing of 1,991 delegates.
Sanders responded with an equally resounding early victory in his home state of Vermont, good for the biggest share of 16 delegates, but the wins kept on coming for Biden.
North Carolina (110 delegates), Tennessee (64), Alabama (52), Oklahoma (37) and Arkansas (31) all broke Biden’s way, as strong voter turnout among the African American community helped prop up his so-called firewall across the South.
But it was the stunners in Texas, Massachusetts and Minnesota that best defined Biden’s resurgence.
And he acknowledged he couldn’t have done it alone.
“We won Minnesota because of Amy Klobuchar!” Biden told his boosters in no uncertain terms. “We are very much alive.”
He also gave shout-outs to ex-Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, like Klobuchar onetime White House aspirants who abandoned their own campaigns and coalesced around the last, best hope of moderate Democrats in 2020.
The last-minute boosts for Biden came as many within the party establishment feared that Sanders — a self-described Democratic socialist — could run away with the race.
As Sanders’ momentum grew, so too did the dread among Democratic moderates and the party’s establishment that the Vermont senator’s left-wing policies and revolutionary rhetoric could not only undercut his electability against President Trump in November — but harm Democratic efforts to retake the US Senate and hurt other down-ticket candidates.
While Biden more than resuscitated his campaign, Sanders hardly left Super Tuesday empty-handed.
In addition to Vermont, he struck back in a big way out West, handily capturing California, the day’s biggest single prize with 415 delegates.
Sanders also romped in Colorado and Utah, home to 67 and 29 delegates, respectively.
In a raucous campaign event of his own in Essex Junction, Vt., Sanders didn’t sweat the early returns.
“Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence we’re going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of the country,” he said.
Nor did he signal any willingness to blunt the pointed politics that landed him in moderates’ crosshairs.
“We’re not only taking on the corporate establishment, we’re taking on the political establishment,” Sanders told supporters.
“We’re going to win because the people understand it is our campaign, our movement, which is best positioned to defeat Trump,” he said.
“You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics.”
Where Sanders’ all-in approach buoyed him with his base, Warren limped through a nightmarish Super Tuesday as the contest increasingly looked like a two-horse race.
Warren’s third-place finish in her home state was actually her most successful outing of the night, as she was on pace to pocket 14 Massachusetts delegates, RealClearPolitics projected.
She also picked up a smattering of delegates in North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Tennessee, but appeared to be shut out elsewhere.
Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg — a late entrant who has reportedly poured more than $500 million of his own fortune into the race — fared little better.
By early Wednesday, Maine was the only undecided state — but Biden was leading.