An emboldened Joe Biden tried to cast himself as the clear moderate alternative to progressive Bernie Sanders on Sunday as the Democrats' shrinking presidential field raced toward Super Tuesday.
One of Biden's leading moderate rivals, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, dropped out of the race Sunday, saying, "We must recognize that at this point in the race, the best way to keep faith with [our] goals and ideals is to step aside and help bring our party and country together."
His departure came just 24 hours after Biden scored a resounding victory in South Carolina, his first of the 2020 nomination fight. Tom Steyer dropped out late Saturday after a third-place showing in South Carolina.
While other rivals appeared undeterred, Biden pressed his case during a round of national television interviews a day after his primary victory in South Carolina. The former vice president was forced to rely upon free media coverage because he was understaffed, underfunded and almost out of time as he fought to transform his first win into a national movement.
Biden vowed to improve his campaign operation, his fundraising haul -- and even his own performance -- in an interview on ABC's This Week. He warned of a "stark choice" between him and Sanders, while making the case he was the candidate who could win up and down the ballot and in states beyond those voting this week.
Biden added a swipe at one of Sanders' signature lines during an appearance on Fox News Sunday: "The people aren't looking for revolution. They're looking for results."
The newfound confidence came at a crossroads in the Democratic Party's primary season. Sanders remained the undisputed front-runner. But the rest of the field was decidedly unsettled, even after Biden's South Carolina blowout and Buttigieg's sudden departure.
Most notably, New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg could create problems for Biden as the race speeds toward Super Tuesday, when 14 states from Maine to Alabama to California hold Democratic elections as the 2020 primary moves into a new phase. No longer will individual states hold primaries every week. Starting Tuesday, and most Tuesdays through early June, batches of states will vote at the same time in what has essentially become a national election.
Biden claimed a handful of new endorsements and fundraising successes on Sunday in his quest to project strength. At the same time, a handful of high-profile political strategists with ties to former President Barack Obama encouraged Biden's rivals -- including Bloomberg -- to quit the race to allow anti-Sanders Democrats to unify behind Obama's former vice president.
"Most of them have seen the writing on the wall for at least the last week," said Rufus Gifford, who held top fundraising posts on both of Obama's campaigns and was part of Biden's fundraising operation. "It's clear the Democratic alternative to Bernie Sanders is Joe Biden."
$46.5 MILLION FOR SANDERS
Text messages reviewed by The Associated Press revealed an outpouring of interest in Biden from donors supporting other candidates, including Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren.
Biden announced he took in $5 million immediately after his South Carolina win, by far his best single day of fundraising over the past year.
Also on Sunday, however, Sanders announced he had raised $46.5 million for February. That compared with $29 million for Warren and $18 million for Biden over the same period.
Sanders, who dominated the money race for much of the year even though he did not court wealthy donors, said it was not the fundraising haul that should impress but the enthusiasm of working people fueling his candidacy.
"No campaign out there has a stronger grassroots movement than we do," Sanders said on CBS' Face the Nation. "That's how you beat [President Donald] Trump."
Biden allies conceded that the post-South Carolina fundraising surge would have little impact on Super Tuesday.
"Super Tuesday is too close," said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Biden supporter. "Fortunately, Joe Biden has been on the national scene for 35 years. He has less need to advertise."
Barry Goodman, a top Biden donor in Michigan and a prominent member of the Democratic National Committee, said he'd heard from about "a dozen or so" regular party donors who had been on the sidelines and now wanted to support Biden. He said he had personally targeted at least 20 Bloomberg supporters who had been sitting on their checkbooks at Bloomberg's request.
"If Mike had known what was going to happen last night in South Carolina, he'd never have gotten in," Goodman said.
While Buttigieg bowed to the pressure, Biden's other rivals showed no interest in getting out of the race. In fact, some vowed to keep fighting no matter what happened on Tuesday.
Warren campaign manager Roger Lau spoke brazenly of pushing into a floor battle at the Democratic National Convention this summer if no candidate emerged from the primary season with a clear majority, which was possible even if someone had a large delegate lead.
"The convention in Milwaukee is the final play," Lau wrote in a Sunday memo.
And Bloomberg, who this week will be on the ballot for the first time, insisted that he was not going anywhere before Tuesday's primaries.
"I'm optimistic," he told voters in Selma, Ala., where many of the White House hopefuls gathered for ceremonies commemorating civil-rights heroism.
Yet Bloomberg received a mixed reception as he spoke from the pulpit of Selma's Brown Chapel AME Church. Multiple parishioners stood and turned their backs to the New York billionaire as he neared the end of his 10-minute speech. That was after the pastor told the congregation that Bloomberg initially said he was too busy to attend because he had to "beat Donald Trump."
Biden declined to ask rivals to bow out when given the opportunity. "It's not for me to tell another candidate to get out of the race," Biden said on Fox.
Trump was paying close attention to the Democratic race.
"How could you be easier to beat than Joe? That guy can't put two sentences together," Trump told attendees Saturday atthe Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington. "But you know he is more down the middle. Everyone knows he's not a communist, and with Bernie there is a real question about that."
DELEGATE RACE HEATS UP
Through four primary contests, the AP allocated at least 58 delegates to Sanders, including two added Sunday as South Carolina's remaining votes dribbled in. Biden vaulted past Buttigieg into second place with at least 50 delegates -- shrinking Sanders' lead from what had been 30 delegates before South Carolina to eight. Buttigieg, Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar remained stuck at 26, eight and seven, respectively.
"Bernie is the clear front-runner, but he's got to get a lead, and a substantial lead, to consolidate his position," said Tad Devine, who worked for Sanders' campaign in 2016 and who advised Andrew Yang this year.
But the first four states were always more about momentum than math. Super Tuesday states offer a trove of 1,344 new delegates based on how candidates finish. California alone offers 415, which is more than double the amount of delegates allocated through Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
Democratic Party rules stipulate that any candidate who gets 15% or more in a district, or statewide, receives a delegate. If only two candidates hit 15% or more and the others fall below that, they would split the delegates, although not necessarily evenly. But if four candidates hit the threshold in a district with four delegates, everyone gets one delegate, meaning the leading vote-getter's total would be held down.
"If Bernie ends up in a situation where he can run up a large enough margin where there is only one other candidate hitting that threshold, that's a big victory for him," said Ace Smith, a California-based strategist who was a senior adviser in the presidential campaign of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. "If he has two or three people, that's not so good because it will profoundly affect the delegates."
At this point, campaigns are focused on districts more than states, hoping to maximize their delegate counts by putting higher priority on districts whose demographics appear more favorable -- for Biden, that means districts with higher concentrations of blacks -- or that have substantially more delegates to award than average. All the campaigns are focused as well on districts with an odd rather than even number of delegates to award.
Super Tuesday has been a fixture of Democratic nominating contests since 1988, the brainchild of Southern Democrats seeking greater influence with the hope that it would boost moderate candidates. That didn't work out as they had hoped, but the concept of a big day of primaries in early March stuck.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FNnDDPLOhg]
In 2008, Super Tuesday had grown to more than 20 states, including California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey. That year saw Obama and Hillary Clinton battle for an advantage, and one victory of the Obama campaign was to shift the media's focus from who was winning big states to the trench warfare of delegate accumulation.
This year, almost the entire focus of Super Tuesday will be on delegates. The landscape this year is smaller than in 2008, but still sprawls across 14 states with votes also in American Samoa and among Democrats abroad. The 14 states include 164 congressional or state Senate districts that will award the majority of delegates. In all, 1,357 pledged delegates -- 34% of the total for the year -- will be awarded.
Two factors make this year's event different from those in the past. One is that Super Tuesday falls just three days after the South Carolina primary, rather than 10 days as it was in 2008. That gives candidates little time for serious campaigning in most of the states and raises the question of how much impact Biden's victory in South Carolina will have on voters elsewhere. The other difference is that the field of candidates competing Tuesday is larger than on previous Super Tuesdays.
[Gallery not loading above? Click here for more photos » arkansasonline.com/32peace]
As Biden and Bloomberg courted blacks in Alabama, Sanders spent his Sunday rallying thousands of supporters in California, the crown jewel of Super Tuesday.
The senator from Vermont predicted victory in California and attacked Biden's record on foreign policy, trade and Social Security, among other issues.
"My point here is not just to be negative about Joe. My point here is to ask you, 'What campaign is going to beat Donald Trump?'" Sanders said. He added: "We are going to win because we have the strongest grassroots movement -- multiracial and multigenerational -- in the history of this country."
Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Bill Barrow, Brian Slodysko, Will Weissert, Seth Borenstein and Alexandra Jaffe of The Associated Press and Dan Balz of The Washington Post.
A Section on 03/02/2020