Former Vice President Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary last Saturday. With 48% of the vote, it’s actually a triumph and the best night Biden ever had during any one of his three presidential campaigns. What may have helped him is the fact that none of the other remaining candidates has much appeal to the black community.
Biden’s win got him back into the game and gave him a lost shot at winning the nomination. Not more, not less. He apparently raised five million dollars over night, which is great, but it still might be too little too late. It all depends now on what he is able to make out of it, in particular with respect to Super Tuesday, which is just a couple of days ahead. At the time of writing, Biden is running third in California and Virginia, and is running 9% behind Sanders in Texas.
And there is Mike Bloomberg who is competing with Biden for the moderate vote. He has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars and is now airing a three-minute ad about the coronavirus. He has skipped the early states and banked everything on Super Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, we will know how much of a factor he will be for the rest of the race.
This being said, I don’t see where the campaigns of Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar are going. It will be interesting to see who will drop out after Super Tuesday and who will stay in. The more candidates there are, the more difficult it will be for any candidate to reach a majority of delegates. Right now, it seems to me that the most likely scenario is indeed that we will enter a convention with no candidate having a clear majority of pledged delegates in the first ballot. At least for once, there would be real news coming out of a convention if that will really be the case.