Presidential candidates look forward to Super Tuesday

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore, Flickr

Super Tuesday is coming up on March 3rd and will be a very important day for all candidates. Historically, Super Tuesday is the day that makes or breaks campaigns, as it tends to show long term viability and overall health of a campaign.

What exactly is Super Tuesday, though? It’s the biggest day for the primary race for both parties because it’s the day that 14 states plus American Samoa cast their vote to nominate their candidate for the Presidential election.

Several large states, such as Texas and California, will hold their primaries on Super Tuesday and have larger pools of delegates to hand out. Thus, success during this day is critical to any presidential candidate making a bid at their party's nomination. 

Poor performance can hurt a candidate's chance of securing the nomination. In a crowded race like this one, some candidates may choose to end their campaigns simply on the merit of understanding that they are not going to win. They would be potentially taking delegates that another candidate would need to win the nomination.

Walking into Super Tuesday, it is important for all candidates to show the best face they can in order to receive the most votes. Currently, the states/territories voting during Super Tuesday are Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia with a total of 1,617 delegates to be given out.

What is important to know about nominations during the primary is that delegates are awarded to candidates based on the popular vote within a district. It is possible to get the popular vote and tie with another candidate in delegate count simply because the districts that one candidate won had more delegates.

Voting style per district remains the same. Candidates with the highest vote amount within a given district will receive all delegates that the district has.

Going into Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders is leading the group of democratic presidential hopefuls with 45 pledged delegates. Pete Buttigieg is currently holding the number two spot with 25 pledged delegates and Joe Biden has the third most pledged delegates at 15.

However, polling shows a very favorable outcome for lead candidate Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday. 

Currently, aggregate polling from FiveThirtyEight shows Bernie's Sanders pulling away with a victory in 13 of the 15 territories/states that are holding a presidential primary, including both Texas and California. FiveThirtyEight, a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, aggregates polling data from across the country in order to compile data that tracks how well candidates are doing overall.

With that said, take this with a grain of salt as presidential primaries have been notoriously hard to predict. Nothing is set in stone until it happens.

 

mbedell@ramapo.edu