What Went Down On Super Tuesday

Dave Wasserman’s tweet here is one possible takeaway from these early returns: that field offices matter less than ever to the results of presidential primaries. I’d urge some caution though: The published peer-reviewed research on field office effects is all from general elections, and those articles estimate the effects to be around 1 percent. Biden’s performance in states like Virginia and North Carolina so far looks on par with his success in South Carolina, and if Bloomberg thought having offices in those states could provide a firewall against Biden there, it was a mistake. I find field offices interesting because they provide a snapshot of the communities campaigns want to invest in and give insight into candidates’ strategies, but I’m under no illusions: They’re simply not going to be decisive except in very close elections, and the states so far are not that.

I think that’s absolutely right, Nathaniel — but Biden’s strong showing so far puts even more pressure on Sanders to rack up big margins in states where he’s also strong, like California.

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.