Super Tuesday Bern...

Bernie braces for decision day

The Vermont senator needs wins in at least five Super Tuesday states to keep pace in the delegate hunt. Short of that, there's no realistic path to the nomination.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Bernie Sanders’ campaign is desperately fighting to prove that Super Tuesday isn’t his final stand.

The outlook is grim: He likely needs comfortable wins in at least five states to realistically keep pace in the delegate hunt. Coming off a deflating loss in Nevada and a thorough pummeling in South Carolina, Sanders’ brain trust views March 1 as a swinging gate that could either reveal — or effectively close off — his path to the nomination.

It’s a trying moment that his increasingly nervous top aides have been prepared to face for months, just not so soon. His campaign wasn’t expecting national news coverage after Hillary Clinton’s 6-point Nevada win to be quite so tough on him. Nor did staffers envision the brutal, 48-point beatdown in South Carolina — where Clinton won every county by double-digits and captured over 80 percent of black voters — and its stifling effect on the Vermont senator's attempts to regain momentum.

Their best-case Super Tuesday scenario looks like this: Of the 11 states holding Democratic contests, Sanders wins Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma -- four states where he’s invested in television advertising. Then he blows out Clinton in Vermont, and keeps it close in Virginia. As long as Clinton’s margins of victory in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas – states with sizable African-American populations — aren’t too overwhelming, he could march onto a trio of friendlier contests the following weekend with a credible case to make. His campaign could argue that Super Tuesday was a split decision, one that would still likely see him trailing Clinton in delegates, but not by an insurmountable margin, thanks to their proportional allocation.

With five states in hand, the bank-shot argument goes, Sanders would be able to claim widespread support from every region in the country, not just Southern, red states like Clinton. That divide, say Sanders staffers, should bolster his claim to the mantle of the party’s true ideological leader. Then, he should be able to reclaim his momentum with three straight wins in Nebraska, Kansas, and Maine — heavily white, and small, caucus states.

If Sanders threads that needle while Clinton romps through the South on Super Tuesday, he’ll lean hard on his argument against international trade deals to power his campaign in Michigan on March 8. That result, his aides believe, might power him into March 15, where it could help him over-perform in Ohio and Illinois.

“There were two ways to win the nomination,” said Sanders’ chief strategist Tad Devine, likening the contest to 1984’s hard-fought primary. “The very quick route of winning Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada and then taking a shot at South Carolina, which was always going to be hard, [or], when that option didn’t become desirable, we decided we’re going to take a different route that goes all the way through California."

It’s a longshot, particularly considering that polls in each of Sanders' March 1 target states are tight. But as long as Sanders' online fundraising juggernaut continues apace his candidacy is likely to keep rolling deep into March. And if Tuesday breaks his way, he believes, he could possibly last until July's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

“We are trying to win every delegate that we can, and not only are we fighting for Super Tuesday, we’re looking ahead to California, the largest state of all, New York state, we think we’re going to do well in Michigan,” Sanders himself insisted on Meet The Press Sunday, trying to break from the shadow of South Carolina by invoking states that vote in June, April and March, respectively.

But all those scenarios rely on Sanders winning a much greater portion of the African-American vote, a core component of the Democratic base and a huge portion of the Democratic electorate in the Southern states voting Tuesday. With just a few days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, there’s little reason to think Sanders will be able to dramatically improve on his performance, meaning Clinton is poised to blow him out across the South, drawing huge delegate margins.

“He spent a decent amount of time trying, in South Carolina, to win African-American voters, so it’s really an indication that he’s not going to do well with African-American voters anywhere else,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray of Saturday’s results. “All the polling is indicating that the rest of the South is probably going to look like South Carolina. The states where I see Sanders having any possibility of doing well are states where the Democratic primary electorate is at least 70 percent white, if not more."

Sanders’ top aides are more hopeful in public – as they see it, Clinton’s momentum from South Carolina could be short-lived due to the compressed calendar, and they think he will get a jolt of energy from the unexpected endorsement of Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a rising Democratic party star, on Sunday.

"The baseline for our performance with African American voters got set so low yesterday that we’re going to improve on it,” said Devine on Sunday, just days after top aides started grumbling about why the candidate was spending any time in South Carolina at all, when the state was clearly going to go to Clinton by a wide margin anyway.

Devine noted that Sanders’ campaign is likely to be well-funded enough to stick around for months longer in any case, dragging out the contest with a front-runner who will be reluctant to claim victory by relying on her popularity with super-delegates, instead wanting to claim the nomination with pledged delegates.

Those close to Sanders say he gets annoyed by questions about his plans to drop out if Tuesday doesn’t go as planned. Why would he, they ask, when there are only two candidates in the race and Clinton hasn’t yet reached 50 percent of the delegates?

When questioned on Wednesday about what he hoped to get out of the Democratic convention, for example, Sanders flashed some of his trademark annoyance with reporters — and at their assumption that he wouldn’t get there with a majority of delegates.

To him, the answer was obvious : “To nominate Bernie Sanders as president."