What Went Down On Super Tuesday

Biden’s victory in Virginia is the first (of what could be several) examples of states with extensive Bloomberg field offices, but a large Biden victory. Bloomberg had seven offices in the state; no other candidate had more than two. He set up offices in smaller cities in the Western part of the state, such as Roanoke, Danville and Charlottesville, and on the coast in Hampton and Virginia Beach. I’ll look more closely at those cities as results come in.

Virginia going for Biden is not exactly a surprise — polls shifted dramatically toward him in the closing days, to the point where he was a 98 percent favorite. Still, preliminary exit polls seem to imply that he’ll get around 49 percent of the vote there, which would beat our projection of 43 percent. Bloomberg is considerably underperforming in the exit polls; it looks like he’s at around 11 percent vs. our projection of 17 percent.

Here are a few findings from the preliminary exit polls in Virginia, which has just been called for Biden. About half the electorate said they decided who to vote for in the last few days, and Biden won 52 percent of that group compared to just 20 percent for Sanders. However, before we go too wild about how much Biden surged in the past few days, Biden won 45 percent among those said they decided before the last few days, still ahead of Sanders’s 30 percent. Another eye-opening stat: Biden won 75 percent among those who said they wanted a return to Obama’s policies, a group that made up 43 percent of the electorate. Biden also won basically everywhere around the commonwealth, including a 45 percent to 27 percent edge over Sanders in the affluent D.C. suburbs, which made up about one-third of the primary vote.