Initial post-Super Tuesday thoughts [Updated]

Update, March 5, 2020 12:11 pm CST: I've added some updates at the bottom of the post.

These are just off-the-cuff ruminations.  If there are better and deeper thoughts out there, please bring them forward!

First the results: as of the time I'm writing this post, Biden has been deemed the winner in North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Texas.  Sanders has won California, Colorado, Utah and Vermont.  Bloomberg won American Samoa.  Maine is still too close to call. 

But it's important to note that Democratic primaries and caucuses are not highest-vote-total-takes-all-delegates.  The delegates for these states are apportioned to candidates who clear a threshold of 15% of the vote.  Thus Texas, which has the 2nd-largest number of delegates this year, with 91% of the vote counted at the time I write this, has Biden at about 33% of the vote and Sanders about 30%, so they'll end up splitting those delegates fairly evenly.  By contrast, in California, the big kahuna with 415 delegates, with 77% of the vote counted, Sanders is leading by a margin of 9 points and should expect to pick up significantly more of that state's available delegates than Biden, who is running a distant second.  Getting the most votes in a state is important, but the margin of victory is also important.

As of now, Real Clear Politics shows the overall delegate count as follows:

Biden: 453
Sanders: 382
Warren: 50
Bloomberg: 45

My initial, amateur take:

• Sanders has real limitations, even within his (adopted) party.  He's looking more and more like a regional, "coastal" candidate, who is able to win in the Northeast and on the "Greater California" coast (that's my made-up term for California itself plus states like Nevada, Utah and presumably Oregon and Washington, and perhaps Colorado, where ex-pat Californians and young people from other areas but similar psychographic profiles have moderated the traditionally conservative Western region).  And he seems to have age limitations, too - older Democratic voters, by and large, don't care for him.  Now that the race seems to have become, for all practical purposes, a two-man marathon, it will be interesting to see whether Sanders is able to score a majority of votes in any remaining state.  Sanders' failure to turn his early primary success into an inevitable march to the nomination surely is the biggest story of the primaries so far.  In my view, these limitations make him a bad bet to beat Trump in the fall.
• Biden is riding a wave right now, but he's more than capable of screwing it up; he already fumbled away frontrunner status once in this cycle.  The pressure is now going to be bearing down upon him heavily.  To show the country as a whole that he is presidential timber, he needs to show he is comfortable as the leader.
• Money isn't everything.  Bloomberg has spent a half billion dollars to earn 45 delegates.  Math was never my strong suit, but I'm pretty sure that works out to more than $10 million per delegate.  Not to be a cynic, but it seems likely that one could simply bribe a delegate for a tithe of that amount, without subjecting the rest of us to the interminable ads.  By contrast, the Real Clear Politics news story I'm sourcing in this post reports that Biden spent less than $10,000 in winning Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren's home state).
• Some old-fashioned political capital, like endorsements, apparently still matters.  Jim Clyburn's endorsement in South Carolina last week is widely credited with boosting Biden's runaway victory there last weekend, which in retrospect started toppling the dominoes: a couple of Biden's moderate rivals dropped out and quickly endorsed him, and that seems to have ignited him to this good Super Tuesday showing.  It's also being suggested that Amy Klobuchar's endorsement may have moved Minnesota into the win column for Biden.  
• Why is Elizabeth Warren still in the race?  She finished a poor third in her home state.  Is her hope that both Sanders and Biden will implode?  Which of the two front-runners does her continuing presence hurt more?

That's enough from me.  Have at it.

Update March 5, 2020, 12:11 pm CST: Both Bloomberg and Warren have dropped out of the race since this original post was composed, so unless there are second-tier candidates still hanging on of whom I've lost track (did Tulsi Gabbard ever officially quit?), we're down to a two-person race now.

As of now on Real Clear Politics, the delegate count is as follows:

Biden: 596
Sanders: 531
Warren: 65
Bloomberg: 58

For those of you who are good at math, you may note that the delegate count differential between Biden and Sanders is precisely the number of delegates that Warren has won, 65.  I wonder if that is significant.  Now that she has dropped, is she obligated to release her delegates?  Or is she able to keep a possible play up her sleeve for the convention?

When Warren officially dropped earlier today, the president, managing to extricate himself for a few moments from the situation room where he is definitely not interfering with Mike Pence's rather ineffective attempts to manage the Covid-19 crisis, found time to tweet out the following magnanimous valedictory:

Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren, who was going nowhere except into Mini Mike’s head, just dropped out of the Democrat Primary...THREE DAYS TOO LATE. She cost Crazy Bernie, at least, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas. Probably cost him the nomination! Came in third in Mass.

Such generosity of spirit is rare indeed.

Over lunch, my wife, a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Democrat (Father: Teamster.  Mother: Chicago Public School teacher.), confessed that she doesn't care for either of the remaining two candidates.  Democrats like us (not that I am one, but there are quite a few like me, college-educated suburbanite, kids in or done with college, et al) fit comfortably neither into Biden's nor Sanders' coalition.  Klobuchar or Buttigieg would have been more our, well, her speed.  Not that voting for Trump is thinkable.  Ah well, this won't be the first time any of us approach the voting booth with a clothespin affixed firmly upon the olfactory openings.