What Went Down In The Arizona, Florida And Illinois Primaries

Tonight’s circumstances were hardly ordinary. Amid the threat of the coronavirus in the U.S., Ohio postponed its election and turnout appears to have been severely depressed in Illinois. Yet, things marched along largely as expected. Biden won — and he won handily — in all three states that voted tonight, pulling off a double-margin victory in Florida and Illinois. (We still don’t have enough of the vote in Arizona to tell you the margin there definitively, but it seems as if Biden is on track for a sizeable victory there as well.)

I won’t bore you with too much more of a recap, other than to say — the primary for all intents and purposes is … over, barring an unexpected development that is outside of the scope of our model. Here’s the live blog team’s headlines, and be sure to scroll for their final takeaways and to relive the live blog in all its chronological glory.

Nate: It Was Already Over, But Now It’s More Over.

Kaleigh: Biden Picks Up Three More States In Quick Succession, All But Sealing His Nomination

Geoffrey: Another Biden Blowout Surely Signals The De Facto End Of The Democratic Primary

Micah: Biden Is The Presumptive Democratic Nominee

Meena: Amid Coronavirus Pandemic And Nationwide Calls To Stay Home, Three More States Held Elections

Amelia: Biden Notches Three More Victories In the Shadow of Coronavirus

Nathaniel: Biden Sweeps The March 17 Primaries, But Progressives Get A Win As Newman Ousts Lipinski

I don’t really have a lot of deep thoughts at the moment. Biden is winning by wide margins everywhere; cities, suburbs, rural areas. Bernie is doing very well among young voters and among some Hispanic communities (though not in Florida) but that isn’t really enough to add up to a winning coalition. We’re at the point now where the delegate math actually is quite forbidding for Sanders; he’d have to win by big, big margins over the rest of the calendar. I don’t know that he’s doing his movement a lot of favors by losing states by 10, 20 and 40 points, and I don’t think sneaking out a win in Wisconsin under odd circumstances or something would really be enough to change the trajectory.

Nothing in the presidential primary race was a surprise tonight, and it looks like Biden is, for all intents and purposes, the “presumptive” Democratic nominee. We now enter a weird period where there won’t be any contests until April 4, so even if Sanders does choose to hang around, the combination of Biden’s sizable advantage and, perhaps more importantly, the laser-like focus on the public health crisis will move the primary race to the background.

I doubt there will be any more debates, for example, given these developments. All of this could make it more difficult for Sanders to break through if his plan is to hang around and influence the party by pushing Biden to the left. I wonder if that will end up being part of his calculation moving forward. We’ll see.

I think someone said earlier tonight that there might have been a world in which a major crisis shook up the race, but in this case, it’s pretty clear that it’s just settled it even more firmly into the shape it was already taking. In all three states, respondents to phone polls were overwhelmingly likely to say they trust Biden more than Sanders to handle a major crisis — by an even greater margin than the one by which those polls had Biden winning overall.

The big headline tonight is obviously that Biden is sewing up the Democratic nomination. But from my vantage point in Illinois, it’s hard not to focus on the impact that the coronavirus crisis has had on this latest round of primaries. There has been some criticism of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker for not postponing the election or moving to exclusively vote-by-mail, but whatever you think of that choice, it’s clear that voters today were profoundly affected by it — whether they had to wait in line because their precincts were suddenly closed or didn’t show up at all. We might be heading into a lull right now in the primary, but it’s not easy to know how we should handle elections during a pandemic, and today didn’t give us any great answers.

Tonight was actually pretty … boring? Everything went as expected on the presidential level: Biden won all three states and just continued his inexorable march to the nomination. On the other hand, if Sanders hasn’t dropped out yet, I see no reason for him not to keep on Sandersing now. The most interesting parts of the night were probably how three states were able to pull off elections amid the threat of the coronavirus — overall, democracy marched on, but not without problems like the low turnout in Illinois. And it looks extremely likely that an incumbent Democratic congressman, anti-abortion and anti-same-sex-marriage Dan Lipinski, has lost to a progressive challenger, which would be pretty big news any other night.

I know I haven’t been doing this as long as some of you but I’m going to go ahead and confidently call Biden the presumptive nominee. I think the chaos and uncertainly of the last few days has only pushed voters even more into Biden’s camp. Sanders might not call it quits just yet, but as mentioned earlier, his is really a campaign of ideas at this point.

My final thought: Will this be the last primary night we live blog? 🤔

Maybe Arizona won’t be an enormous win for Biden, but it was one of Sanders’s best remaining states given how well he did in Nevada and California. Sanders really isn’t performing well anywhere at the moment.

OK, folks. We’re not going to stick around for the bitter end — that’s what a next day reaction is for (sorry, Nathaniel) — so with ABC calling Arizona for Biden, that’s a wrap. Biden wins all three states tonight, although the margin (especially in Arizona) isn’t entirely clear yet.

But it’s time for final takeaways — is Biden the presumptive nominee? Does Sanders hang in? The biggest unanswered question in all this might be that we won’t have another primary until early April — and maybe not even then — but where does this leave us in the primary moving forward?

With early votes reporting from nine of Arizona’s 15 counties, including Maricopa, Biden is at 43 percent and Sanders is at 30 percent.

That’s right, Nate. We don’t have all that many votes yet — so we don’t know the final margin — but ABC News projects that Biden will win the Arizona Democratic Primary.

Actually, scratch that, I’m not totally clear on whether Bloomberg’s votes will count or not. I guess with ABC calling the race, it doesn’t really matter.

Apparently, Bloomberg and some other candidates won’t have their votes counted in Arizona because they officially withdraw early enough. If you remove those candidates, Biden’s lead in Maricopa is a bit better, 52-37.

Biden leads 42-30 in initial returns from Maricopa County. A lot of votes for Bloomberg and others so these look like quite early returns.

Some action on the Republican side of the ledger tonight: In the open and deep-red Illinois 15th Congressional District, farmer Mary Miller has won the GOP nomination and will almost certainly be elected to the House in November. That’s significant because she will add to the small number of Republican women in Congress. There are currently 13 Republican women in the House, and two of them are retiring this year.

Yeah, Nathaniel is right. Arizona is like Illinois in that one county outweighs the rest of the state combined. Maricopa County accounted for 53 percent of Arizona’s Democratic primary vote in 2016, for instance.

Sanders only won one county in 2016: Coconino. That may be his best (only?) bet for a win tonight in the Grand Canyon state.

Sarah, it starts and ends with Maricopa County. The county that includes Phoenix, Chandler, Mesa and Scottsdale is home to a majority of the state’s voters, making county-by-county analyses fruitless in Arizona.

OK, we should be getting some of the first results in Arizona soon — although because it’s a heavy vote-by-mail state it could be awhile before we get full results, but what should we be looking at to help us gauge things?

To answer a question from forever ago, it looks like the Florida Panhandle did have a significant protest vote today — it was just split among several different candidates.

Yes, that’s what I’m thinking — Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, all off the board. Biden probably still has a good March 17, but maybe Illinois and Arizona (unknown at this point but Biden heavily favored) are notably closer. Sanders might be in a position to win the April 4 contests then Wisconsin on April 7. Questions about Louisiana and Kentucky moving their primaries outside the Democratic National Committee’s window for holding elections would be much more than academic.

Indeed. If this had happened in 2016, I can only imagine how messy it would have gotten … fast

It’s not like they have school tomorrow.

Nate, the kids in Arizona are still waiting up for results.

Well yeah but the fact that Sanders didn’t give a shit about rallying the party behind him is one of the reasons why his campaign really effed up. Sorry for the mild profanity but it’s 10:49 p.m. so figure the kids are all in bed.

One thing is clear — the drop in turnout in states like Illinois, and the postponement of many primaries, would have brought about much bigger legitimacy problems if the Sanders-Biden race was still competitive.

And what if super Biden-friendly states like Georgia and Louisiana had still decided to postpone their primaries in a more competitive race? It would have been crazy.

The scenario where Sanders wins states like Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota and even Texas on Super Tuesday to make it a competitive race going forward is kind of wild to me because where would things be with the coronavirus leading to the postponement of multiple primaries? I think Nathaniel is right that Biden would’ve benefited from the crisis, but that sort of result on March 3 might’ve suggested it was a closer overall contest.

What if The Party had rallied to Sanders? I have to imagine his ceiling would have been higher in such a world.

I will say (and how’s this for a hot take?) that if the whole Party Decides On Biden thing had not happened and Sanders had remained the front-runner, the coronavirus scare probably would have moved the race strongly to Biden around now anyway.

If Lipinski should lose, that would reduce the number of pro-life or at least moderately anti-abortion Democrats in the House to really only Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas and Rep. Ben McAdams of Utah. Cuellar narrowly won renomination in Texas two weeks ago (a lifetime ago, if feels like) against a progressive challenger.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh I’m halfway between Rakich and Micah. Actually, most of the way toward Micah. Clearly he couldn’t close the deal. Would some Democrats have come along if it was a choice between Sanders and a brokered convention? Yeah, probably. But they sure as heck seemed eager for a non-Bernie alternative. And the Sanders campaign presumed it could just win by the brute force of its turnout operation without actually having to persuade anyone.

Micah, I think in an electoral free market, he would not have had a ceiling (or at least it would have been higher than 50 percent). But I think the Democratic powers-that-be created one by making it clear that Good Party Members should support Biden.

OK, we’re done with the states debate and avoiding the pizza debate — back to real analysis and I have a substantive question. I tweeted this awhile ago:

So, did Sanders have a ceiling?

That was a fascinating race, Nathaniel, because Conway pumped so much money into his campaign — only to be attacked by some critics as a fake progressive. It’s really interesting to see how prosecutors’ races have become so important in local politics over the past few years as progressive have prioritized electing reformers.

For the true election nerds on this live blog, in Illinois, Kim Foxx has won reelection as Cook County state’s attorney, a victory for progressive criminal-justice reformers.

I was grocery shopping during the Great Pizza Debate Of 2020 and I’m so sad I missed it!

I’m too new here to make enemies.

Chris, that scab is way too fresh to pick at.

Be careful, Micah. I sense we’re veering dangerously toward the “Which pizza is the best?” / “What even is pizza?” conversation we had in Slack earlier today.

Back to the election for a moment — I think I’m ready to call the Illinois 3rd Democratic primary. With 82 percent reporting, Newman leads the incumbent Lipinski by about 4 points. Tough to see him overcoming that margin at this point.

The answer is … Texas.

Then you should pick and tell us why Micah.

Kaleigh, making overly broad and simplified characterizations of the states is a foundational part of this game.

To be fair, if the idea is to get away from people, every state can offer that. Just because a state has a high population density doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have rural areas.

I’d throw in with you Nathaniel. I say we pick tribes.

My randomly selected joke pick of a state is holding up quite well.

I’m telling you guys … Montana.