Remembering Super Tuesday 2020
Four years ago, Super Tuesday was one of the last big news events before the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just days later, the U.S. and much of the world would go into lockdown in an effort to stem the virus's spread.
As Julia noted, in 2020, Super Tuesday marked the point when the Democratic Party consolidated behind Biden. But I think that, partly because of the pandemic, even close observers of American politics don't appreciate just how unlikely Biden's Super Tuesday comeback was.
This year in Iowa, Ron DeSantis's second-place finish with 21 percent of the vote was enough to effectively end his campaign. But in 2020, Joe Biden came in fourth in the Iowa Democratic caucuses.
Similarly, pundits have viewed Trump as the prohibitive favorite in the 2024 race since at least his New Hampshire victory, when he topped Haley 54 percent to 43 percent. In 2020, however, Biden's New Hampshire performance was far weaker than Haley's this year — he finished fifth in the state, winning just 8 percent of Democratic primary voters.
But in a very short period four years ago, Biden resurrected his campaign. He convincingly won South Carolina on Feb. 29 thanks to his strength with Black voters, who had been few and far between in Iowa and New Hampshire.
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Then, both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg endorsed Biden in the run-up to Super Tuesday, consolidating the more moderate side of the Democratic Party against Bernie Sanders. That, in turn, positioned Biden for a decisive Super Tuesday win that made him the front-runner in short order. While Sanders won California, Biden won 10 states, including Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas.
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What explains the dramatic change in Biden's fortunes over a few short days leading up to Super Tuesday in 2020? In his book "Learning from Loss," political scientist Seth Masket emphasizes the Democrats' overwhelming aim to defeat Trump, and to find a candidate who gave them the best chance of doing so. At the time, there was evidence that Biden ran better against Trump than other Democrats. Many Democrats were willing to follow the cues of party leaders about their most competitive candidate, and in doing so, they vaulted Biden to the nomination.
In this year's GOP primary, there's some evidence that Haley may be a stronger general election nominee than Trump. But in a late-November survey I conducted via YouGov, GOP voters overwhelmingly saw Trump, not Haley, as their strongest candidate, and there's no evidence that's changed. So on the Republican side, the grounds for a similarly sudden Super Tuesday switch just aren't there.
—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor
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