Former Vice President Joe Biden extended his lead in the delegate race for the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday with a commanding win in Florida, one of three states to hold primaries as the country grappled with the coronavirus.
There are 441 delegates at stake from the contests in Florida, Illinois and Arizona. A string of earlier victories had put Biden ahead of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the race to amass the minimum 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination and challenge Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election.
Ohio had also been scheduled to vote on Tuesday, but Governor Mike DeWine postponed his state's primary until June 2 because of the growing coronavirus crisis.
Here is a quick look at Tuesday's primaries:
FLORIDA
Delegate Count: 219
Biden is projected to win and will secure at least 58 delegates. Sanders will win at least 16 delegates.
With 85% of precincts reporting, Biden was winning in every county in the state. Sanders' praise of literacy programs in Cuba under the nation's Communist former leader, Fidel Castro, prompted widespread criticism of the senator in Florida, a state with a sizable Cuban-American population.
Most polls closed at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT).
ILLINOIS
Delegate count: 155
Biden is projected to win Illinois, according to Fox News.
A handful of recent polls conducted in Illinois since the March 3 Super Tuesday contests in 14 states had shown Biden with a big lead. In 2016, Sanders lost the Illinois primary to Hillary Clinton, the party's eventual nominee, by 2 percentage points.
Polls closed at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT).
ARIZONA
Delegate count: 67
Polls close at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT Wednesday).
Sanders has done well in Western states so far this election, victories his supporters attribute to large support from Latinos. But even that may not be enough to give him a win in Arizona, where polling conducted this month found him trailing Biden by about 20 percentage points.
(Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)
