What Went Down On Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday began with Southern states coordinating as a way of increasing their influence. This took on special significance in 1988 as some party leaders, on the heels of major losses in 1980 and 1984, sought to move the party to the center for strategic reasons. Important context for this was the fact that the last time Democrats had won the White House, in 1976, Southern states had formed the backbone of the Electoral College coalition. In the 1980s, Southern Democrats held a substantial number of seats in Congress.

Super Tuesday is still a big deal in the South, but it’s not because of the kinds of white moderate Democrats that the 1988 contest was intended to serve. Instead, the voters in these states in the primary are heavily African American, and Super Tuesday, along with other Southern primaries, allows candidates to signify strength with this key constituency.

As in the past, voters will also go to the polls outside the South. But Democrats don’t really harbor serious ambitions to win presidential elections in places like Arkansas (where Hillary Clinton won about 33 percent of the vote in 2016). As a result, this growing cluster of primaries is no longer really cast as a way of pulling the party in a specific ideological direction.

So far, three states have been called for Biden and just one has been called for Sanders. Right about now, some media outlets may be tempted to start crafting a “Biden is winning Super Tuesday” narrative. Don’t do it! As I said on the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight web series Confidence Interval, that narrative would be premature.

The lack of surprise in the results so far reminds me of my pet theory that intra-party politics is becoming more like inter-party politics, predictable by race, age and region.