Update: Okay, one more update. Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report is studying the Texas map and estimating how many votes are still out — and he’s detecting a distinct tinge of Joementum:

I've seen enough. Projection: Joe Biden wins the Texas primary.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020

It’ll probably be hours before a major network makes that call, but Wasserman is rarely wrong.

Update: With almost 27 percent reporting in Texas, Biden has begun to cut into Bernie’s four- to five-point lead. It’s down to three now, 28.5/25.5. I’m going to bow out on that note, in the expectation that we have many hours to go before the count is finished. (Texas has been known not to report final results until the day after the election.) Looks like a stalemate is shaping up — although, again, Bernie would really like to have this one so that he can say he took the biggest states on the map while the media is buzzing about “Joementum.”

Update: California was called promptly for Bernie at 11 p.m. ET, suggesting a comfortable win there. That’ll offset a chunk of Biden’s delegate gains elsewhere tonight. But the tight race in Texas means there won’t be a significant delegate advantage for one man or the other from the result.

Update: An interesting question at FiveThirtyEight: Does it matter much at this point what happens in Texas and California?

In light of Biden’s big upset in Minnesota and the fact that this is now his seventh win of the evening — he’s also leading in Massachusetts (which would be another big upset) and Maine — how much do California and Texas matter at this point for Sanders, especially if the result in Texas is super close? In other words, as we near 11 p.m. on the East Coast, how much of this “Biden surges” narrative is intractable?

Bernie would like to win both, by whatever margins, just to have some meaningful victories to point to tonight. But realistically it looks like we’re headed towards a close finish in Texas regardless of which candidate wins; at the moment, Mike Bloomberg is also north of the 15 percent threshold for viability, meaning that he’ll get some delegates out of Texas too. That means the delegate haul for the statewide winner should be relatively modest. Don’t get me wrong — every delegate counts. But Bernie’s obviously not going to assert himself as the clear frontrunner in the race tonight as everyone expected a week ago, especially with Biden having notched two momentous upsets in Massachusetts and Minnesota and an impressive victory in Virginia. I mean…

Kornacki predicts that Biden will have an 80-90 delegate lead over Bernie when all the non-California ballots are counted. "Biden can get out tonight ahead in delegates."

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 4, 2020

Update: Alabama was called more than two hours ago, but with about a third of precincts reporting Bernie is hovering at around 16 percent of the vote. If he slips below 15 percent, Biden’s delegate haul from the state will increase. Which means Bernie’s presumptive victory in California will do even less than expected in padding his national delegate count vis-a-vis Biden.

Update: The count in Texas is slow but Bernie’s four- to five-point lead has held up so far.

Update: And at a few minutes before 10 p.m. ET, the WSJ projects Arkansas will also go for Joe Biden. Texas is the last state on the board here. I hope we get a result before the wee hours. In the meantime, let’s not overlook the raw insanity of not just what Biden’s doing tonight but how he’s done it:

Joe Biden is mopping the floor in states that he never visited, where he opened zero field offices, and where he spent next to nothing on TV.

— Matt Viser (@mviser) March 4, 2020

Update: Ah, here’s a fun result from Texas while we wait for the presidential results:

https://twitter.com/brent_peabody/status/1235033222548987904

Cisneros was the most well-known primary challenger to a Democratic incumbent backed by AOC this year, and she’s fallen flat here. I wonder if that result would have been different if not for the surge in Joementum over the past 72 hours. Biden’s strong showing tonight may have brought more Cueller-friendly moderate Texas voters than anyone was expecting.

Update: An excellent point:

Oklahoma is the cleanest test tonight of how much of Sanders’s 2016 vote was simply anti-Clinton.

In 2016 exit poll, Sanders won OK independents by 48 points, and only lost moderates by 1 point.

Tonight he’s up just 14 with independents, losing moderates by 36. #SuperTuesday

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) March 4, 2020

How much of Bernie’s “revolution” is/was just anti-Hillary sentiment that’s now petered out?

Update: Here’s Joementum captured in a single data set, and why Biden has hope of pulling it out in Texas tonight.

Decided in the last few days via @CNN exit polls:

AL: 62% Biden, 13% Sanders
TN: 61% Biden, 16% Sanders
VA: 60% Biden, 17% Sanders
MN: 55% Biden, 21% Sanders
TX: 49% Biden, 21% Sanders
OK: 45% Biden, 17% Sanders
NC: 43% Biden, 22% Sanders
ME: 42% Biden, 19% Sanders

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) March 4, 2020

Update: Sounds like it’ll be tight in Texas:

The Texas exit poll confirms what we're seeing in the results: a very tight race here between Biden & Sanders.

A reason why: a third of the electorate is Hispanic, & Sanders won 45-24 among them.

— Taniel (@Taniel) March 4, 2020

Update: Even if Biden ends up narrowly losing Texas and California, he’s having a good night nationally and Bloomberg very much is not. Which may end up granting him his fondest short-term wish, a total resolution of the “muddle in the middle.” Ahem:

NBC News: Mike Bloomberg to reasses his campaign tomorrow

— Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) March 4, 2020

Update: It took 68 minutes of returns but the AP has now called Oklahoma for Biden. He’s up by 12 points with 75 percent reporting. It seems all but certain that he’ll win Arkansas too now, so it’s all down to Texas for a clean sweep of these four.

Update: Still very early in Texas but right now Sanders, Biden, and Mike Bloomberg are all north of the 15 percent threshold and Elizabeth Warren is on the cusp. If all four clear the bar, even a Bernie statewide victory won’t produce the sort of delegate windfall for him that it might otherwise have.

Update: Ah, a good note for Bernie in the Texas exit poll, per CNN: 77 percent of Texas voters said they decided on their vote early, before the last few days. Maybe Joementum will be muted there.

Update: Is the surprisingly tight early vote in Texas less of a good omen for Biden than we think? Nate Cohn makes the case:

It's tough to game this out.
On the one hand, this is a good result for Biden compared to our expectations
OTOH, early voters are old and so maybe the election day vote won't be as great as you think if it's disproportionately young https://t.co/TkLZLk3r2E

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) March 4, 2020

More context from Henry Olsen:

For people following the TX early vote, it's almost all from Dallas and Harris (Houston) counties. This is the black vote's base. Latino San Antonio (Bexar) and El Paso counties not in, and Austin (Travis) not in either. Expect Bernie to lead the early vote once they drop.

— Henry Olsen (@henryolsenEPPC) March 4, 2020

Yep, the AP has Bernie ahead by six points with 21 percent of precincts reporting. Now we wait to see if the Election Day vote shows up in Texas for Biden as forcefully as it has elsewhere.

Update: Still no call in Oklahoma, but with nearly two-thirds of precincts reporting Biden leads Sanders by six points. He seems headed for a win there too, although not by blowout margins a la Virginia. On the other hand, OK was a Bernie state in 2016. He’s losing, not gaining, ground.

Sanders's pledge to bring new voters into his movement seems fairly empty in the results we're seeing so far. His coalition has shrunk since 2016, not grown.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020

Update: Another good omen for Biden from Texas:

Dallas County, TX (early vote):

Biden 27%
Sanders 25%
Bloomberg 20%
Warren 11%
Buttigieg 9%

If Biden won the early vote there, it's a good omen for his prospects statewide.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020

Sure looks like he’s going to sweep all four states I’m covering here.

Update: Nate Cohn of the NYT says Biden is now favored to win the most delegates tonight — a shocking turnabout given the expectations around 120 hours ago that Bernie would run up the score on Super Tuesday.

Update: FiveThirtyEight notes that the electorate in tonight was *not* majority African-American, as it was four years ago. Whites were 51 percent of voters. Didn’t matter for Joe: He won them by 27 points.

Update: You’d expect early voting in Texas, a supposedly tight race, to skew towards Bernie since many of those ballots were cast when Sanders was dominating the race. But that’s not what we see:

Batch of TX early votes (Buttigieg at 9%, Klob at 4%) show Biden nearly tied, so he's probably won there too. pic.twitter.com/OTvJhQGTdH

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) March 4, 2020

Literally one week ago we were gaming out Super Tuesday as the night Sanders would become the de facto presumptive nominee. It may turn out to be the night *Biden* becomes the presumptive nominee.

Update: Will Bernie hit the 15 percent mark in Alabama and qualify for delegates there, or will Biden take the whole haul? Hmmmm:

Biden leading exit polls in AL roughly 60% to 20% over Sanders. The key question is whether Sanders hits 15% in #AL07, the only African-American majority district in the state. If not, it's a four-delegate swing for Biden.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020

Update: It’s 8 p.m. and the polls are finally closed in Alabama and Oklahoma. The latter is momentarily too close to call but Alabama has been called — a Biden landslide, as expected, thanks to its majority African-American electorate. This was a foregone conclusion; the real stunners thus far this evening are North Carolina and Virginia, where Biden is north of 50 percent with more than 70 percent of the vote in. He’s blowing the doors off there, in a state where Bernie competed hard.

Update: Based on the results in Virginia and North Carolina — two states that seemed close-ish just a week ago — Joementum is very, very real. How real?

If Biden can win TX and keep CA within single digits, he'll likely exit Super Tuesday with a delegate lead that's close to insurmountable.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 4, 2020

Update: A good early omen for Bernie?

#Texas @ABC News Exit Poll,

Opinion of socialism:
Favorable 57%
Unfavorable 37% pic.twitter.com/Xlb13eXRuU

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) March 4, 2020

Update: A poor early omen for Bernie:

Breaking news: young people still don't vote. In NBC News exit poll, 13 percent of voters were between 18-29

— Shannon Pettypiece (@spettypi) March 3, 2020

His entire argument for nominating him is that he’ll unleash the youth vote in November. He can’t even unleash it now!

Update: The only candidate left who’s spent less on ads than Joe Biden is Tulsi Gabbard, notes Chris Cillizza. If Joe cleans up tonight, it’ll be a lab-quality experiment that a candidate with very, very high name recognition doesn’t need much advertising to parlay one big win into a national electoral force.

***

We could start with a few paragraphs on the state of Joementum, but you know all about that already if you read this post. And even if you didn’t, this new national poll from Morning Consult should tell you all you need to know. Two days ago Bernie led 29/26. Today?

Bro.

In almost 15 years of blogging elections I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a momentum shift like that. It’s anyone’s guess how big the break towards Biden might be tonight coast to coast now that Buttigieg and Klobuchar have endorsed him. That’s not to suggest he’ll win everywhere; he’s all but certain to finish behind Bernie in the most delegate-rich state on the map, in fact. But no one should be surprised if Biden outperforms his polling this evening the same way he did in South Carolina a few days ago.

In particular, he may blow the doors off in more than one of the states I’m covering. The deep south is Biden country thanks to the large share of black voters in the primaries there. The southwest is less predictable, but Biden is now favored in FiveThirtyEight’s model to finish first there too. You can think of these four contests as being on a spectrum of certainty, in fact:

1. Alabama’s electorate was 54 percent African-American in the 2016 primary. That’s a Biden landslide in the making.

2. Arkansas’s electorate tilts towards whites but more than a quarter of voters there in 2016 were black. Hillary Clinton, a semi-native daughter, handled Bernie easily in 2016 because of it. Biden should have little difficulty too, especially at a moment when he’s surging nationally. FiveThirtyEight gives him a 69 percent chance of winning with Mike Bloomberg, not Bernie, the biggest threat to defeat him. The new Data for Progress poll that I wrote about this morning found Biden ahead by 13 points.

3. Oklahoma was a Bernie state in the 2016 primary, with Sanders defeating Clinton by a comfortable 10-point margin. African-Americans were just 14 percent of the primary electorate four years ago, making this a heavier lift for Joe. Even so, Data for Progress found him up seven points there over the weekend. FiveThirtyEight actually gives him better odds of winning here, 78 percent, than in Arkansas.

4. Texas is the real prize tonight and the outcome that’s most in doubt. Sift through the polling over the last few months and you’ll find that the state has been bouncy. Right up until the eve of the Iowa caucus Biden was leading steadily, sometimes by blowout margins. Then Bernie won Iowa and New Hampshire and things took a turn: Sanders led eight straight polls of Texas between mid-February and the start of March. An Emerson poll taken on Saturday and Sunday found him still ahead by five — but today’s Data for Progress survey shows Biden surging back into a narrow two-point lead. It’s anyone’s ballgame, although FiveThirtyEight narrowly favors Biden (55 percent chance to win) over Sanders (43 percent) partly because of Joementum and partly because Hillary won this state handily in 2016. Last night’s party unity rally in Dallas featuring Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Texas’s own Beto O’Rourke may help too.

It may be, in fact, that the outcome in Texas drives the national media narrative on the race tomorrow. The state would be closely watched tonight regardless since it’s the second-biggest delegate haul at stake and famously trended purple in the 2018 midterms, but because California takes so long to count its votes there’s apt to be no clarity from the west coast when reporters sit down to weigh the overall state of play late tonight. If Biden stuns Bernie with an easy win in Texas — or vice versa — that’ll be taken as a leading indicator of who’s likely to end up as the nominee. Especially since Texas is racially diverse and the two key minority groups there are expected to go different ways. Will Bernie’s Latino base prevail or will Joe’s base of black voters? The Texas electorate was 32 percent Latino and 19 percent black four years ago. Watch those numbers tonight.

If you’re following returns, don’t get completely caught up in the Biden vs. Bernie showdown. Remember that each of them has an also-ran candidate crowding their “lane” of the primary who may reach the magic number of 15 percent viability statewide and in individual districts, which means that that candidate will get a cut of the state’s total pool of delegates. In the four I’m covering here, it’s Biden who has to worry about an also-ran more so than Bernie: Mike Bloomberg is the X factor, having spent a combined $66 million in these states — including $52 million in Texas alone — to try to get a piece of the delegate pie. Some of the biggest suspense this evening is whether Bloomberg’s support will hang in there at levels of 15 percent or better, which will reduce the delegate haul that the winner will get from a particular state, or whether Joementum will carry some critical mass of Bloomberg’s voters into Biden’s column. The best-case scenario for Joe tonight is a clean sweep of all four with Bloomy missing the 15 percent threshold in each. Not only will that mean a delegate bonanza for Joe but it might convince Bloomberg to quit immediately.

And of course the same goes for Bernie and Elizabeth Warren elsewhere. Any place where Sanders wins but Warren clears the 15 percent bar — in California, possibly — means a lighter haul of delegates for Bernie. And given the way things are going between him and Biden, every delegate counts.

Thanks to California, it may be weeks before we know how all of the delegates at stake nationally tonight were awarded among the candidates. But here’s a rule of thumb from Cory Booker’s former campaign manager about how to judge if it was a good or bad showing by Bernie:

Agree with Mark that this is the likely spread once all is said and done – Sanders by somewhere between 50-250 delegates. Four days ago I would have said 150-350 so that is a pretty dramatic shift. https://t.co/2DF1axYLYa

— Addisu Demissie (@ASDem) March 3, 2020

As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Nate Silver’s model suddenly has Biden’s odds of winning a plurality (not a majority) of delegates before the convention at 65 percent. Expectations for Joementum are sky high — maybe unreasonably so. The polls close in Alabama and Oklahoma at 8 p.m. ET, in Arkansas at 8:30 ET, and in Texas at 8 and 9 p.m ET. Updates will be posted at the top of this thread. One question to bear in mind as this gets going: Will coronavirus jitters affect turnout? I ask because, in reading up on Texas today, I ran across this story about some poll workers not showing up to work for fear of catching the disease, leading to delays at some polling places. If turnout is lower than expected nationally, that might explain why. And that might bode well for Sanders, whose cultish followers are more likely to show up to serve The Cause than the “meh, fine, I’ll vote for Joe” moderate contingent.