What Went Down On Super Tuesday

Voters largely in the Midwest who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 have received the bulk of swing-voter coverage in the last three years. But there were also significant swings from Romney to Clinton (or a third party candidate) in 2016. Those swings were most dramatic in the well-to-do suburbs of cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, and they were ignored because they didn’t change the Electoral College math in 2016.

However, Democrats’ gains in the House in 2018 threw those changes into stark relief. Democrats picked up all but one of the the 13 Romney-Clinton congressional districts, whereas they only picked up six Obama-Trump districts, leaving five in Republican control.

As far as the 2020 Democratic primary is concerned, the degree to which Romney-Clinton voters will participate is an open question, as is whom they’ll back. According to analysis from the New York Times’s Nate Cohn, before South Carolina’s primary they appeared to be supporting Bloomberg. But exit polls from South Carolina suggest they may have turned out for Biden. If these voters sense that the race is turning into one between Biden and Sanders, they could indeed decide to vote tactically for Biden.

We will know a lot more about how these voters are behaving after tonight, since we’ll have results from Texas, California and Virginia, where many of them live.

Geoffrey, you mock the pain of visual journalists everywhere.

The best part about Bloomberg winning American Samoa is that we are forever guaranteed another color on 2020 primary maps, even if Bloomberg can’t win a single other contest.