What Went Down On Super Tuesday

James Comey, who lives in Virginia, tweeted today that he voted for Biden. One of Biden’s aides then mocked this, although the aide later said that the campaign appreciated the endorsement. I think the prominence of Never-Trump Republicans in the media (on MSNBC in particular) and their aversion to Sanders has been really helpful to Biden. These people reinforce the message that Biden is the electable candidate, since these Republicans suggest they will cross over to vote for him but not Sanders. I am sure Comey is not the typical Virginia Democratic primary voter, but I suspect he kind of represents the high-information, Northern Virginia types who might have been choosing between Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Biden and then only had one choice today.

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.