HOUSTON — All week, as former Vice President Joe Biden labored in South Carolina for his sweeping primary victory, other candidates jumped ahead to mine for delegate gold in a state that will be key to where the 2020 presidential race goes from here — Texas.
Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, was serving tacos and berries to Houston supporters a few days ago. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts rallied 2,100 in Houston and picked up the endorsement of an important national teachers union leader on Saturday. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont attracted thousands to rallies across the Lone Star State, one of the 14 states voting in the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries.
That competition heralds the big shift that will now take place in the Democratic nominating contest, with South Carolina’s primary votes having been counted. The 2020 race has abruptly turned from one-state-at-a-time combat into a national contest. Amassing delegates now is the name of the game.
“You do need to shift from the first four states, where it’s about winning states,” said Lily Adams, who was an advisor to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Sen. Kamala Harris last year. “In March, it’s about winning delegates, and you have to have a sophisticated strategy about where you are going to deploy your resources.”
California, with its 415 delegates, is the biggest prize on Super Tuesday, but there is little suspense about the outcome: Multiple polls show Sanders as the runaway favorite. The latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll for The Times found Sanders had a 2-to-1 advantage over his closest rival, Warren.
Delegates are awarded only to candidates who earn 15% of the vote statewide or in individual congressional districts.
Texas, which awards the second-largest cache of delegates, 228, has a more fluid, competitive race and will be the first big test of Biden’s ability to refute Bloomberg’s claim to be a better alternative for moderate voters who fear a Sanders victory.
“If you want somebody who has the resources to beat Trump, that’s me,” Bloomberg said in Houston.
Biden’s big victory in South Carolina gives him a much-needed boost. But Biden’s ability to compete in a costly state like this has been limited by his lackluster fundraising, and his organization was thinned to divert staff into early-voting states.
Biden has planned campaign stops in Houston and Dallas on Monday — the first time he’s campaigned in Texas since mid-January, when he went there for fundraisers, according to a candidate tracker maintained by the Dallas Morning News.
Texas — along with other Super Tuesday states such as Virginia and North Carolina — will test whether the momentum Biden will gain from his victory in South Carolina, and the support from African American voters that powered it, will be enough to overcome those disadvantages in money and organization.
Sanders is well positioned in Texas because he has been able to tap into a network of supporters of his 2016 presidential bid — even though he lost the state to Clinton. Sanders held rallies across the state in recent weeks, as his rivals were still campaigning in Nevada and South Carolina.
In a sign of his confidence there and in California, Sanders is stumping this weekend in Massachusetts, aiming to beat Warren in her own backyard — or at least pick up some of her home-state delegates.
Throughout last year, Biden had a solid polling lead in Texas, but it collapsed in January.
“Sanders and Biden are competing for the top two slots as of now, but the field is volatile,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin. “With Warren and Bloomberg’s average poll numbers hovering around 15%, in a volatile environment, they are at least in the hunt for delegates.”
