AUSTIN, Texas _ Former Vice President Joe Biden opened a small lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders in Texas on Super Tuesday after the former vice president gained momentum with his victory Saturday in South Carolina and endorsement by three former rivals Monday night in Dallas.
With nearly half of Texas' precincts reporting, Biden had moved into the lead, with 30.7% of the vote to Sanders' 28.7%. Billionaire businessman and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was third at 17.7% and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was fourth with 10.2%.
In Travis County, a liberal bastion, with 72% of the vote in, Sanders was leading with 37.4% of the vote, Warren was second at 25.3%, Biden was at 12.4% and Bloomberg at 9.7%.
The Texas results came on what was looking to be a very strong night for Biden, with big wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma, as voters from Maine to California (plus American Samoa) cast their ballots on Super Tuesday.
Suddenly Democrats were confronted with what had become a four-person race, and, maybe by the time all of Tuesday's results were accounted for, a one-on-one showdown between Sanders and Biden.
Bragging rights in the coast-to-coast competition, which will pick a third of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in July, will depend most especially on the outcome in Texas, which offers the second largest trove of delegates to California, but also the least certain outcome, and the one most likely to bend the direction of the campaign to come.
The first results were an unsurprising victory for Sanders in his home state of Vermont, and far more significantly, a quick call of Virginia, based on exit polls, as a big win for Biden the instant polls closed, and an equally quick call of North Carolina as a Biden landslide. When the polls closed in Alabama, it was another big win for Biden.
According to the MSNBC exit polls, Biden was winning two-thirds of the black vote in Virginia and had a double-digit lead among white voters. In North Carolina, according to the exit polls, Biden was beating Sanders among black voters, 63% to 16%, and among white voters, 38% to 25%.
In Alabama, which has the largest black proportion of the electorate of any of the Super Tuesday states _ nearly half _ exit polls had Biden sweeping 72% of those voters.
The New York Times reported that according to early exit polls, Virginia voters had a 2-to-1 favorable view of Biden, but were evenly split in their opinion of Sanders.
Also, unlike Texas, where probably about half of the vote was banked before Election Day in early voting, before all the late-breaking momentum for Biden, there is very limited early voting in Virginia.
Biden also won a narrow victory in Minnesota, home state of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who ended her own campaign for president on Monday, endorsing Biden.
"It's a good night and it seems be getting even better, it's still early but things are looking awful, awful good," Biden told supporters in Los Angeles.
Biden said he had been told not long ago that his campaign might end on Super Tuesday, but now, "It may be over for the other guy."
"I am here to report we are very much alive," he said.
"We won Minnesota because of Amy Klobuchar and we are doing as well as we are in Texas because of Beto O'Rourke," Biden declared at his Los Angeles celebration Tuesday.
O'Rourke, a former rival who ended his campaign Nov. 1, also offered Biden an ebullient endorsement Monday night in Dallas.
In addition to Vermont, Sanders won Colorado and Utah, and told supporters gathered in Vermont that he would prevail.
"I tell you with absolute confidence we are going to win the Democratic nomination," Sanders said.
The results potentially set up a long slog to the Milwaukee convention between two white men in their late 70s (Sanders is 78 and Biden is 77) with utterly opposite visions of how to beat Trump.
For Sanders it is to do what Trump did in 2016, take over a party from the outside invigorating its reach to those alienated by politics as usual and scramble the conventional political logic.
For Biden it is to come together and seek to calm the waters, making as broad an appeal as possible for a return to normalcy, focusing mostly on keeping Trump, a president like no other before him, from going from a one-term oddity to historical game-changer.
"Four years after Barack Obama, having this guy as president was an aberration," Biden said at a rally at Texas Southern University in Houston on Monday. "But if we give him eight years, he will fundamentally alter the nature of who we are."
But beyond the mano-a-mano battle between Biden and Sanders, the outcome in Texas and the other Super Tuesday states will go a long way to determine the future of the other two candidates in the race _ billionaire businessman and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
(The only other candidate still running who participated in any of the official Democratic Party debates _ U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii _ is a fringe player, though she finished second to Bloomberg in the caucus in American Samoa.)
Both Bloomberg and Warren were each, in their own way, contingency candidates.
Warren is, by and large, simpatico with Sanders on policy but without his gruffness and his and his followers' take-no-prisoners absolutism. He's an avowed democratic socialist, and she is an avowed "capitalist to my bones." She is also a very smart woman, which, depending on one's critique of American politics, is either an advantage or a disadvantage.
Through much of the spring and summer, it appeared that she might be successfully supplanting Sanders as the chosen candidate of the left. But Sanders roared back to life as the accept-no-substitutes real deal, and Warren now finds herself mostly hoping she can hang in long enough and collect enough delegates along the way to be an acceptable compromise candidate at a brokered convention.
Bloomberg, a late-entry who was facing voters for the first time Tuesday after spending more than half a billion dollars on a state-of-the-art media campaign and lavish organization, was also drawn to the race by Biden's evident weakness as the more moderate choice.
If Biden's resurgence appears to be real, as the results suggest, and Bloomberg comes up short, he will feel enormous pressure to end his bid and get behind Biden.
Super Tuesday arrived with Sanders having assumed the mantle of front-runner after strong performances in the first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and the sputtering start of Biden, the previous holder of that title.
But Sanders' good start appeared more daunting before Biden's revival and especially his show of strength with black voters, who also proved Sanders' nemesis in his battle for the nomination against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Sanders has shown remarkable strength with Latino voters, perhaps in part because so many are young _ his greatest source of strength _ a thrilling prospect for Democrats in Texas and elsewhere for whom that is the not-at-all-secret formula for turning Texas blue.
But the problem facing Sanders, as it was in 2016, is that he is fighting not just the Democratic party's political establishment and mainstream currents, but its black leadership and rank-and-file sentiment. It is very hard to cast your cause as a progressive movement while losing the African American vote.
Monday morning Biden was at Texas Southern, a historically black college in Houston, thanking the mostly African American audience for their support and that of black voters in South Carolina, who had revived a candidacy that was one loss away from failure.
By that evening, Biden was in Dallas, receiving the backing of former rivals Buttigieg, who had quit the race on Sunday, and Klobuchar, who ended her campaign Monday, and O'Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso, who left the race before the first votes were cast. Billionaire activist Tom Steyer also ended his candidacy after the South Carolina vote, but has not thrown his support to another candidate yet.
By the time voters went to the polls Tuesday, it was shaping up as a gut-check referendum on whether Democrats wanted to roll the dice with Sanders, who has inspired a movement of the young and disaffected, or find safe harbor with Biden.
"This looks like the clash between two equal-sized coalitions," said Chuck Todd on MSNBC not long before the polls closed. "Texas is the perfect test."
