How Biden Beat Expectations On Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday was very good to Joe Biden. Roughly one-third of Democrats nationwide cast their ballots for president in the first big primary election of the year, although not all of those ballots have yet been counted. Accordingly, we won’t be unfreezing our primary forecast until we have a clearer picture of the exact results. But we can confidently say that, whenever it bleeps and bloops back to life, the forecast will show Biden on the rise. Not only did he win the states he was expected to win on Tuesday, but he proved his cross-sectional appeal by notching a few wins on what was supposed to be Sen. Bernie Sanders’s turf.

Heading into yesterday, it looked like Super Tuesday was going to break down along regional lines, with Biden winning the Southern states and Sanders winning those in the North and West. Biden certainly held up his end of the bargain: Our model gave Biden a 2 in 3 chance or better of winning the six Southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia — and he carried all six by double digits. In fact, he exceeded our already-lofty expectations in these states. For example, our average forecast in Virginia put Biden at 43 percent of the vote and Sanders at 23 percent; Biden got 53 percent in real life and Sanders 23 percent. And in Alabama, we forecasted that Biden would beat Sanders 44 percent to 21 percent, on average; the final results were Biden 63 percent, Sanders 17 percent.