What Went Down In Michigan, Washington And Other Democratic Primaries

Mississippi is an outlier tonight in one way: it’s the only state holding a primary today in which most counties still vote via direct recording electronic devices (D.R.E.s) These machines are one-stop-shops where voters key in their preference on a touchscreen, and their vote is stored on a memory storage device. There is no paper record, which is why election security experts aren’t fans. And D.R.E.s have been known to malfunction, something we saw documented as recently as last summer’s gubernatorial primary runoff:

https://twitter.com/STaylorRayburn/status/1166347828152680449

Mississippi is one of six states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina) plus D.C. where the Democratic primary electorate is likely to be majority or plurality black. So Biden has at least three more big wins coming: Georgia on March 24, Louisiana on April 4 and Maryland on April 28.

It’s notable that Mississippi is such favorable territory for Biden that he even won voters under 45, 51 percent to Sanders’s 45 percent. (Of course, he won voters over 45 by a landslide — 86 percent to Sanders’s 12 percent.)

And Mississippi is an old electorate — just 26 percent of voters were under 45. (In fact, there were so few under-30-year-olds — 8 percent — that the results aren’t even broken out by candidate.)