Brian Cahn/ZUMA Wire

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) endorsed Joe Biden for president Sunday morning, several months after Harris ended her own historic bid for president. She is just the latest of several former presidential contenders to align behind the former vice president. 

“We need a leader who really does care about the people and who can therefore unify the people. And I believe Joe can do that,” she said in a video posted to Twitter.

Kamala — You’ve spent your whole career fighting for folks who’ve been written off and left behind — and no small part of that alongside Beau. From our family: thank you.https://t.co/ePtRKVjzXB

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) March 8, 2020

While the endorsement doesn’t come as a surprise—in fact it seems as if Biden accidentally leaked it himself yesterday—it does paper over one of the most unforgettable moments of the 2020 campaign so far. Back in June—1,592,867 years in campaign time—Harris confronted Biden on stage at a Democratic debate, getting deeply personal in confronting her opponent over his warm remarks about segregationist senators. As my colleague Jamilah King wrote at the time:

She started with Biden’s recent whimsical recalling of his relationship with segregationist senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, and then pivoted to a deeply personal story of being in the second class to desegregate Berkeley’s public schools while then-Sen. Biden opposed the busing that made it possible. It was an exchange that put Biden on the defensive, and won widespread praise on Twitter.

As a reporter and San Francisco native who has followed Harris’ career since she was district attorney of my hometown, it’s hard to overstate just how jarring the moment was. Harris’ oratory wasn’t a surprise; she’s become pretty memeable in the Senate for her brutal questioning of several people in Trump’s orbit. What was different was how personal Harris got.

She doesn’t talk about herself often, which seems weird for someone in the public eye, but it’s true. Over the years she’s attributed this to her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a woman who emigrated from India at 19 and went on to become a breast cancer researcher. “I was raised in a way that one does not talk about themselves or their feelings,” Harris, laughing, told The Cut in January. She grew up in an analytical household, sure, but perhaps more importantly, it was also one that was helmed by a dark-skinned immigrant woman with an Indian accent who was forced to fight her own battles every day.

That doesn’t mean Harris hasn’t tried to meaningfully use her personal biography. Her career is nothing if not a series of firsts: first black woman to be DA of San Francisco, first black woman to be attorney general of California, first Indian-American woman and second African-American woman to serve in the Senate. But she doesn’t dwell on those firsts often, and seems almost uncomfortable when they’re brought up, usually saying something along the lines of: My mother always taught us that it’s okay to be the first, but make sure you’re not the last. …

But note that these personal tidbits, doled out ever so carefully, are about race, but they’re not really about race. Like the Chisholm-inspired campaign colors, they checkmark the historical context of her life, but they’re facts, not feelings. There’s still a reserved quality that some voters have picked up on, one that’s probably sexist and unfair, but also real. There’s also the very real dismissal that women and people of color get from white establishments whenever they’re seen as too focused on their personal narrative, which is misread as playing in too deeply to “identity politics.” The unspoken critique is that they’re lazy, unqualified, and focused on themselves instead of the work. In an April interview with “Pod Save America,” Harris said such critiques are used to “shut people up.”

It was a pivotal moment in her campaign, and while it wasn’t enough to ultimately sustain it, I have a feeling it will remain a key point in both her personal political trajectory and in how we talk about race (and hold candidates accountable) on the campaign trail.

Harris says she’ll join Biden at a rally in Detroit Monday night, just a day before Michigan votes in another crucial primary.

Charlie Neibergall/AP

Late Thursday evening, the New York Times published a provocative-headlined story about Bernie Sanders. Previously unreported records from an archive in Russia detailed the Soviet government’s efforts in the 1980s to use the sister-city relationship between Burlington, Vermont, (where Sanders was mayor) and the Russian city of Yaroslavl as a vehicle for propaganda.

Exclusive: For Bernie Sanders, his 1988 trip to the Soviet Union was an effort to build diplomatic ties. For the Soviets, it was the start of a years-long propaganda effort to exploit his antiwar agenda, documents obtained by The New York Times show. https://t.co/I4UsqheKHQ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 6, 2020

It was a nice bit of archival spelunking, but there wasn’t much to see—a file in an old archive in Yaroslavl indicating that the Soviet government believed that Sanders’ visit to the country (and sister-city arrangements more generally) was an opportunity to teach Americans about the benefits of the Soviet system and to promote the idea that the USSR had a “peace-loving foreign policy.”

Okay, but that effort went both ways. Anxious about the prospect of nuclear war, a lot of American cities were turning to sister-city partnerships with Soviet cities in the 1980s—Gainesville, Florida, and Novorossiysk probably had the best logo. And as a Sanders spokesperson points out in the story, the idea was embraced by President Ronald Reagan as a way of promoting the American way of life in a communist country. That certainly seems to have played out in Burlington, when a Soviet delegation visited Sanders’ city in 1988. According to the Times, “There was a pilgrimage to the ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, where co-founder Ben Cohen told the Soviet officials they could have anything they liked in the gift shop, a delegation member, Yuri Novikov, recalled in an interview.”

The Times’ reference to a “years-long propaganda effort” is also a bit much; the Soviet Union only had three years left in 1988—and had much bigger things to worry about.

I’ve also reported on Sanders’ 1988 visit to the USSR—I even watched several hours of unreleased video footage of the expedition, which doubled as a belated honeymoon for Sanders and his wife, Jane. The idea that there was something nefarious or incriminating about it just doesn’t mesh with what I saw. It was certainly a highly-structured trip, as the Times finds in the official records; in the footage, they were almost always accompanied by some official guide, ushering them around the subway system in Moscow, music and theater venues, housing complexes, farms, and parks. But they were exposed nonetheless to the widening cracks in the Soviet system. They gawked at a new American-style pizza place that had opened in Moscow and posed for photos with someone in a Ben & Jerry’s t-shirt. If the Soviet government was pushing propaganda, they didn’t do a very good job of it. As the Washington Post reported last year:

It was “strange” (as Sanders himself wrote in his memoir) and awkward and sometimes sweet. Sanders and his delegation showed a curiosity and an earnestness about their mission, which ended, as you’ve probably seen, with vodka shots and gift exchanges (a Beatles album; a “Bernie for Mayor” t-shirt) in a Yaroslavl sauna. But any doubts about the sincerity of the sister-city relationship between the two cities should be dispelled by its longevity. All these years later, the cities still schedule hockey games with each other. In fact, there was one in February, played on a frozen-over Lake Champlain. The Burlington weekly paper, Seven Days, included a nugget that captures the spirit of the thing:

The [Yaroslavl] Bears also had a secret weapon. One of their players was sidelined with the flu, so in his place they subbed a former UVM club hockey player. Steven Ushakov, 25, was literally born of the sister city program. In the early ’90s his father, Sergei, traveled to Burlington as the sound technician for a Yaroslavl band. Through the musical exchanges, he fell in love with a Vermont woman and moved to Burlington, where Steven was born.

While political pundits fight over what exactly went wrong for Elizabeth Warren, one thing is reasonably agreed upon: The former Harvard law professor was one of the 2020 contest’s most qualified candidates, one whose unrivaled policy expertise became an unlikely but rousing campaign trademark. 

Not according to Donald Trump. Nope. While speaking at a press conference on the coronavirus Friday, the president offered his own take on the situation.

“I think lack of talent was her problem, she has a tremendous lack of talent,” Trump said, denying that gender politics had played a role in Warren’s downfall.

“She’s a very mean person, and people don’t like her,” he continued, inadvertently but ever-reliably deploying sexism with the very statement. “People don’t want that.”

Then in perhaps his most ridiculous political observation, Trump asserted that voters “like a person like me, that’s not mean.”

Fact check: Donald Trump is a very mean person. We’ll have some video evidence for you in a moment.

TRUMP on Elizabeth Warren: “I think lack of talent was her problem. She had a tremendous lack of talent … she is a very mean person and people don’t like her. People don’t want that. They like a person like me that isn’t mean.” pic.twitter.com/kZqCajHWrU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

Mark Rightmire/Orange County Register/ZUMA

In the final weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders’ shoe-leather organizing machine descended upon the senior centers, retirement communities, and assisted living facilities that would be host to one of the state’s 60 satellite caucus sites. For the better part of an hour, surrogates would spend time with small groups to hammer home Sanders’ record on preserving Social Security and how his proposed improvements to Medicare could benefit a population already covered by the government program.

In the end, the effort didn’t make a ton of difference. Sanders only received 9 percent of support from voters over 65 in Iowa. And Sanders didn’t fare particularly well at those sites, either.

After Iowa, the campaign slowed its outreach to seniors, banking instead on younger voters who showed a natural affinity for Sanders. But the youth-led revolution never arrived, and on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden shellacked the Vermont senator on the backs of older voters. Now, to rescue Sanders’ candidacy, the campaign is making a late push to win over seniors, the age group most likely to vote.

Sanders has cleaned up with young voters, typically grabbing at least half of the under-30 set’s support in each contest. Super Tuesday was no exception: Exit polls suggest Sanders captured 58 percent of the votes cast by 18-to-29 year-olds earlier this week, compared to just 17 percent of those voters who cast their ballots for Biden.

But Sanders has struggled mightily with those over 65, picking up just about 15 percent of their support in contests so far. Biden, meanwhile, has scored big with voters on the far end of the age spectrum: On Super Tuesday, he walked away with nearly half of the votes from voters over age 65. Anecdotally, older Sanders supporters I’ve spoken with have told me that they love him because he represents the best vision for the next generation, not their own.

It’s not for lack of interest on Sanders’ part. Throughout his three decades in both the House and Senate, Sanders has repeatedly introduced legislation to improve Social Security benefits, including bills to tie benefits to the Consumer Price Index for the elderly; since the late 1990s, he’s led bus trips with seniors over the border to Canada to draw attention to the high cost of prescription drugs. “It fits into his conception of programs like Social Security, which are at the core of his belief, but also about how society abandons people and creates loneliness,” Ari Rabin-Havt, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, told me.

In the 2020 race, his suggested reforms to Social Security are far more aggressive than Biden’s: Sanders proposes increasing Social Security benefits by $1,300 per year for seniors with annual incomes less than $16,000, as well as raising the floor on the minimum benefits paid so low-income workers get a bigger share when they retire. Currently, Medicare does not cover long-term care, and Sanders’ revisions to the program under Medicare for All would do so. “We should do ads and mailers emphasizing that Bernie Sanders wants to expand Social Security and improve Medicare,” says Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a national campaign co-chair. “We have a plan to deliver the most for seniors and we need to tell that story.”

Sanders hasn’t really been pushing that story of late. In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses, he slammed Biden for his past support for cutting Social Security, critiques that rested on Biden’s 1995 vote for a balanced budget amendment that would have automatically cut Social Security and for leading 2011 debt-reduction talks with Republicans when Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment was on the chopping block. Sanders released an ad featuring archival audio of Biden promising to freeze Social Security benefits—and a present-day Sanders promising to expand them. But since Iowa, there hasn’t been much.

Going forward, that changes. The campaign plans to return to those Biden attacks, now that the primary has come down to a two-person race; it released a new cut of his earlier Social Security ad on Wednesday. And the campaign is trying to revive the tactics it used in Iowa (even though that didn’t produce a noticeable electoral bump). Sanders will still do a characteristic big rally during his trip to Kansas City, Missouri on Monday, but he’ll fit in a town hall with seniors that day, too—a more intimate setting for Sanders to appeal to a population with less of an appetite for Sanders’ rock show-style events. While the elderly are less likely than their youthful counterparts to engage in typical organizing activities—like holding a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office—there are still coalitions to tap into. Their plan includes appeals to local and state AARP chapters and making a concerted effort to do voter-to-voter contact with the 55-plus set, not just the 18-to-35 that’s been the primary focus so far.

Biden, of course, says he’d never consider Social Security cuts today and proposes securing the solvency of the Social Security program under his plan for “older Americans.” But in what’s suddenly a two-person race, the Sanders campaign hopes keeping attention on Biden’s past and Sanders’ plans could put a dent in Biden’s senior support.

Bernie Sanders arrives for his primary night rally in Vermont.Matt Rourke/AP

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont democratic socialist, has been trying for five years to convince Democratic and independent voters to join a political revolution and back his hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. He has drawn thousands to his mega-rallies. He has inspired millions—many of them young and idealistic—and persuaded millions of American citizens to vote for him. But over the course of two presidential election cycles, he has so far demonstrated that most voters do not want the Sanders revolution.

Joe Biden’s victories on Super Tuesday have been hailed as one of the most stunning and impressive comebacks in presidential politics. But this collection of primaries was also a referendum on Sanders and his effort to sell democratic socialism to America. The frontrunner heading into these crucial contests, Sanders was soundly beaten by a guy who, across three presidential bids, had never won a primary until three days earlier in South Carolina. Once other non-Sanders candidates had dropped out and backed Biden, the picture became clear: The Democrats are not the party of revolution—at least not yet.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. Though Sanders had won two of the first four contests (and was essentially tied for first in another) and pundits were huffing that he might be unstoppable, his showings did not indicate he had won over enough Democratic voters for an easy remake of the Democratic Party. In those races, he received 25 percent, 26 percent, and 34 percent of the initial vote, which was enough to place him at the top of a crowded field. Four years ago, though, he collected 45 percent of the primary vote total when he ran against Hillary Clinton. He has been far below that this time.

Sure, there were more contenders slicing up the pie. But his drop indicated that many of the 2016 voters who had supported him had moved on—a sign that they had been with him back then because he was the only alternative to Clinton, or that they now are looking for something else, or that they think Sanders is not the right candidate to beat Donald Trump, or a combination of all this. Sanders’ win last month in New Hampshire was telling. In 2016, he bagged 152,000 voters in the Granite State and achieved victory with 60 percent of the vote. This time, Sanders won again, but with 76,000 votes and a quarter of the electorate. His band of rebels eager to take on the Democratic establishment had fallen in half.

The results from the first four states combined with the early numbers out of Super Tuesday—they are still tallying in California—have Sanders at 28 percent of the combined vote. Biden pulled 35 percent. (Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren each gathered between 12  and 13 percent.) That Sanders figure, which may creep up, is not close to the 45 percent he earned against Clinton overall. 

All this suggests that Sanders has not expanded upon his impressive 2016 run—and that his revolution is less popular now than it was four years ago. Many mainline Democrats have worried that should he gain the nomination, the general election would shift from a race about Trump to a contest about Sanders and socialism (and that this could have a disastrous impact on Democratic candidates running for the Senate and House). There’s no way to know if such a fear would come true before giving it a shot. But the Democratic Party, it turns out, has been hosting a form of this experiment, and Sanders has not fared as well as he had anticipated.

At the heart of Sanders’ presidential bid has been two core elements. First, he’s a different sort of candidate with a different sort of politics. He has campaigned as an authentic, no-bull, and dedicated ideologue who champions a clear critique of a corrupt political order dominated by billionaires and corporate interests, and as a visionary who offers a set of wide-ranging structural proposals to make the United States a more just and equitable society. Second, he and his team have claimed that because of all that, he creates a new political dynamic—one that will draw to the polls millions of citizens who have not previously voted. That is, his democratic socialism might scare off some voters, but the new voters he attracts—young voters, Latino voters, working-class voters—will dramatically reshape the electorate and provide the Democrats the winning margin.

The first part of his argument is undeniable. Sanders campaigns like no other national candidate. He doesn’t cut corners; he names names; he embraces a full-left agenda. And he has done so for decades. As such, he built a powerful grassroots movement that raised gobs of money for his insurgent campaign. He forged a relationship with supporters that few politicians do. He sparked an enthusiasm that other candidates can only dream of. But here’s the but: This has not caused millions of new voters to flood into the Democratic Party for a Sanders takeover. There has not been a historic surge of young Sanders voters—at least not enough to compensate for his poor showing among African Americans, suburbanites, and older voters. It’s true his voters tend to demonstrate more passion—and passion can help a party win a general election. But Sanders has yet to prove his theory of the case. That’s just math.

In the aftermath of Super Tuesday, some Sanders backers resumed the usual griping and moaning about the Democratic establishment’s opposition to their movement. Marianne Williamson, the New Age author whose presidential bid fizzled and who has since endorsed Sanders, described Biden’s win as a “coup,” as if these victories were the rigged product of a conspiracy mounted by Democratic powers-that-be. Such talk helps Trump more than anyone else.

Moderate Democrats worried about a Sanders nomination did indeed rally to Biden after the former veep showed he was capable of winning a primary in South Carolina. But that was no secret plot. It was a natural development. And the party establishment’s revulsion at the prospect of a Sanders’ triumph is hardly a shocker. Sanders has not been a member of the Democratic Party. (He still identifies as an independent in the Senate.) Moreover, his socialism could be a problem in the general election. (Throughout his long career, Sanders has never faced hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads that attempt to brand him as a far-left wacko outside the American mainstream—which is likely to occur should he become the nominee.) There is no way the party was going to warmly welcome him into a loving embrace.

That’s the challenge for a maverick. Sanders was crashing the party. It’s not supposed to be easy. Yet the Democrats, in several ways, allowed him that opportunity. In 2016, some state party chairs considered trying to keep Sanders off the primary ballots in their states. The Democratic Party chair at the time, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, told them not to do so. And those Democratic emails that the Russians stole and released through Wikileaks? They showed no true effort on the part of Democratic insiders to do in Sanders. There was some jiggling of the debate schedule, but it turned out not to cause Sanders any real trouble. And in 2016, as in 2020 (as of yet), Sanders did not have to contend with a massive blitz of negative ads from Democrats. (That could change in the coming days and weeks. There were some anti-Sanders ads run in the days before Super Tuesday by a group organized by centrist Democrats.) 

Sanders has had a wide open shot at selling his brand of democratic socialism and at remaking the Democratic Party in his own image. All he had to do was get enough votes to overcome the built-in advantage for the moderate, non-socialist candidate favored by the party’s establishment. Ultimately, most Democratic primary voters have said no thanks. 

Long before Super Tuesday, Sanders had succeeded in becoming a brand-name politician. People knew him and knew what he stood for. After years of decrying dirty-money politics, fighting for progressive causes, and preaching revolution, Sanders had achieved market saturation. The same perhaps could be said for Biden. Despite all his stumbling in the previous months, Biden was as well-known a quantity as a politician can be. It was a fair fight—even though Sanders had millions of dollars more and Biden was low in resources and had done poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. The revolution fought the moderate, and the moderate won. 

The Democratic race is not over. The past few days have made a watchword of “volatility.” Both Biden and Sanders have distinct liabilities. The see-saw ride may not be done. But this much has been determined: Sanders, the great progressive advocate, has tried to present his case as one of inevitability—only he and his version of democratic socialism could defeat Trump, and this could only be accomplished by rousing revolutionary fervor to radically remodel the Democratic electorate. At this stage of the crazy 2020 contest, the results are not with him.

Jessica Cisneros, candidate for Texas' 28th Congressional District, lost Tuesday night.Thomas McKinless/CQ Roll Call/Zuma

Jessica Cisneros, a young border Democrat, just narrowly lost to “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” in the Texas House District 28 primary. Cisneros, a 26-year-old immigration lawyer who ran on plans to demilitarize the border, gut the private health insurance market, and shutter privately run immigrant detention centers, fell short to Rep. Henry Cuellar—who “has a lifetime A rating from the National Rifle Association, opposes abortion rights, and has voted with President Donald Trump more often than any other Democrat in Congress.” 

BREAKING: Henry Cuellar wins Democratic nomination for U.S. House in Texas's 28th congressional district. #APracecall at 9:32 a.m. CST. #Election2020 #TXprimary https://t.co/lGfinjTqT4

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) March 4, 2020

Her campaign evoked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 grassroots ethos and upset victory over powerful New York Rep. Joe Crowley, pushing people to hope Cisneros’ campaign would be a litmus test for the larger progressive movement. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote back in January:

There’s a lot riding on how well Cisneros does. If the kinds of policies she’s pushing, like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, are going to take hold in the Democratic Party, they’re going to have to catch on in places like South Texas. Either you figure out how to sell universal health care to people crossing the border for a mammogram, or your movement withers on the vine. Cisneros’ success or failure will rest heavily on a question that a lot of Democrats are asking: Just how much of a revolution do people want?

Read Tim’s great profile here.

On Wednesday, the Bernie Sanders campaign released three new advertisements aimed at voters in the six states casting their primary ballots next week. And one of them touts Sanders’ relationship with President Barack Obama, an eyebrow-raising assertion for a candidate who had stood out among elected officials one of the 44th president’s fiercest left-leaning critics.

This ad, titled, “Feel the Bern,” layers audio narration from Obama over campaign images and archival footage of the Vermont senator’s appearances alongside the 44th president. The voice-over lavishes 30 seconds of Sanders praise from Obama, noting he has “great authenticity, great passion, and is fearless.” Obama also says Sanders “got bills done” from his perch on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs committee, countering an attack advanced by Sanders’ detractors that the senator, by virtue of his stubborn commitment to liberal ideals, has failed to compromise or get legislative results. 

The audio is not something Obama recorded for the campaign, and rather comes in part from a 2016 Politico interview Obama did about his potential successors, a conversation in which the president heaped praise on both Sanders and his opponent that year, Hillary Clinton. The advertisement’s first line, “Bernie is somebody who […] has the virtue of saying exactly what he believes, and great authenticity, great passion, and is fearless,” omits a clause from the original soundbite in which Obama admits that Sanders is someone “I don’t know as well because he wasn’t, obviously, in my administration.”

Another clip comes from Obama’s 2016 Democratic National Convention speech, when he was pushing party unity and lauding the organizing fervor Sanders’ supporters had brought to the primary campaign.

Sanders is just the most recent Democratic 2020 hopeful to lean on the sky-high popularity of the 44th president among Democrats to make a case to voters. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg put his own spliced cut of Obama praise on airwaves last month. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has premised his entire campaign on the “Obama-Biden” administration and has the ads to match.

But Sanders’ take is perhaps the most conspicuous: Sanders had been, among liberal federal lawmakers, one of Obama’s most vocal critics. The Atlantic reported last month that the Vermont senator had contemplated mounting a primary challenge against Obama during the 2012 election cycle.

And Obama returned the skepticism in kind. He’s taken pains to remain publicly throughout the primary, but reportedly once said in private that he would step in to stop a Sanders nomination if it looked likely.

Listen to MoJoreporters Tim Murphy and Fernanda Echarvarri explain Biden’s big night, Bernie’s long fight, and the knockdown fight for delegates to come, on this special Super Tuesday edition of the Mother Jones Podcast:

Preston Ehrler/SOPA Images/Zuma

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and winner of just a handful of delegates, has withdrawn from the Democratic presidential race. He endorsed Joe Biden.

“I’m a believer in using data to inform decisions,” Bloomberg said in a statement on Wednesday morning. “After yesterday’s results, the delegate math has become virtually impossible—and a viable path to the nomination no longer exists.”

The former New York City mayor invested more than $500 million of his own money in an effort to become the consensus candidate for a fractured party, but he instead found himself flayed onstage during a pair of debates—most prominently by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

No matter where you looked during the feverish weeks of the primary season, Bloomberg was there, with social media influencers shaping the debate online and a half-billion-dollar TV ad campaign seeking to convince voters to send him to the White House.

But Bloomberg’s record as mayor and his behavior toward women at his company dogged his campaign from the outset. During his three terms in city hall, Bloomberg embraced the use of discriminatory policing practices, including the NYPD’s notorious use of stop-and-frisk searches. He had a history of making sexist comments about women in his workplace and received fierce criticism for the number of female former employees who were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Despite his self-professed adherence to data-based decision-making, Bloomberg gravely miscalculated how far money would get him in this campaign. Turns out, it’s harder to buy the presidency than it seems.

I watch my fair share of professional football. I’ve seen every season of HBO’s Hard Knocks. And yet, I have never seen a would-be lineman bring it the way Joe Biden advisor Symone Sanders just did. The demonstrator had the bad sense to storm the stage at Biden’s speech in Los Angeles on Tuesday night in an attempt to bring her anti-dairy message to a nationally televised audience, and Sanders was having none of it.

Y’all see Symone Sanders come off the line like a pro bowl linebacker. Geesh. pic.twitter.com/2Fib5ZqLoN

— Billy Michael Honor (@BillyMHonor) March 4, 2020

There’s the sprint, the grab, the tackle, and the yank off the stage. It wasn’t just a tackle…it was a stomp.

I broke a nail. #SuperTuesday

— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) March 4, 2020

Of course she did! 

California, subject of the hit 1971 Joni Mitchell song “California” and biggest prize of Super Tuesday, was called by the Associated Press for Sen. Bernie Sanders moments after polls closed.

It will probably be a while before the final results are in and the state’s 415 delegates are allocated. A call this quick was unexpected and suggests a significant turnout for Sanders.

Jeff Sessions speaks at a farewell ceremony for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Main Justice Building May 09, 2019 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jeff Sessions is one step closer to returning to the US Senate, where he served for 20 years until Donald Trump tapped him as his first attorney general. Tuesday’s primary in Alabama will send Sessions and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville to a run-off election on March 31 that will finalize who will be the Republican nominee—a contest where the president’s endorsement, if given, could prove critical. In November, the winner of that contest will face incumbent Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who won the seat in a special election after Sessions joined Trump’s cabinet in 2017.

The top three candidates heading into Tuesday were Sessions, Tuberville, and GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne, and all three worked to outdo the others in showing their loyalty to Trump. “God sent us Donald Trump because God knew we were in trouble,” Tuberville, who has leaned hard on religious messaging, said in a recent TV ad. Byrne trained his fire on both Tuberville and Sessions; in one ad, he claimed Tuberville was fired from Auburn and supports “illegals” in the United States, while accusing Sessions of letting Trump down and failing to put Hillary Clinton in jail. Sessions ran his own ad attacking Tuberville for moving from Florida to Alabama to run for the seat, and reminding voters of his strong support for Trump in 2016 while highlighting Byrne’s comment that he was “not fit” to be president after Trump’s Access Hollywood comments emerged. 

Sessions enters the runoff as a known quantity across Alabama, with many of the advantages of incumbency. But with Tuberville running as an outsider trying to clean up Washington and support Trump, voters may determine that Sessions has become part of the establishment that betrayed the president, who fumed over Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation and ultimately fired him. If Trump still holds a grudge—and he’s known to hold plenty—he could endorse Tuberville or pointedly sit out the race. Meanwhile, incumbent GOP Sen. Richard Shelby has endorsed Sessions, his longtime colleague.

Also contending on Tuesday was former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who lost to Jones in 2017 amid accusations that he had assaulted teenage girls. He finished far behind the top contenders.

A fierce fight is expected ahead of the runoff later this month. The winner of the runoff will have a good chance of unseating Jones, widely viewed as the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, in a state where Trump is very popular among the state’s GOP majority.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has pulled off an improbable victory in Massachusetts, marking a major loss for Sen. Elizabeth Warren in her home state.

Massachusetts, birthplace of the author of the words you are reading, will award 91 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has won the Democratic presidential primary in Minnesota, according to multiple sources.

Minnesota, home of songwriter Robert Zimmerman, more commonly known as Bob Dylan, will award 75 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has won the Democratic presidential primary in Utah, his third win of the night, according to multiple sources.

Utah, which hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics, will award 29 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

This evening, hours before the polls closed in California, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the state’s voters to “stay in line” amid reports of long lines and dysfunctional voting machines.

Stay in line, friends. Your vote is imperative. https://t.co/KDJjT3W1sP

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) March 4, 2020

A spokesperson for California’s secretary of state told the Associated Press that election workers in 15 counties reported problems connecting with the state’s voter registration database.  

In Los Angeles, where more than 5 million people are registered to vote, voters have reported long lines outside polling places. Inside, poll workers have been trying to keep up with LA County’s first redesign of its voting technology in more than a half-century. In some places, the wait to vote was three hours.

Update: there are now 3 hour waits at the ONE voting center on campus at UCLA

Yes only one at UCLA with 40k students

And the other two a 15 min walk
w/
3 hour wait &
Now 4 hour wait time

Students are genuinely walk away in line, I’m watching them#SuperTuesday #LosAngeles

— Sophia “VOTE” Armen (@SophiaArmen) March 4, 2020

Overheard outside a West Hills voting center where the line wraps around the corner and the wait is more than an hour. “Now here’s where we could use some Girl Scouts” #CaliforniaPrimary pic.twitter.com/I6oxNv9ORe

— Sonali Kohli 🙆🏾 (@Sonali_Kohli) March 4, 2020

Longest lines I’ve ever seen in Los Angeles. 3 hour wait times in West Los Angeles. Reports of even longer lines at voting centers at UCLA.

— Samuel Braslow (@SamBraslow) March 4, 2020

The New York Times detailed the snafus: 

At the root of the delays seemed to be slow technology. For the first time, voter rolls were electronic so people could cast their ballots at any vote center. But that meant when the tablets poll workers used to check in voters were overwhelmed, it caused major backups in the lines.

There was also confusion about whether those who had filled out interactive online ballots ahead of time could join a separate, shorter line. There were also reports of voting machines malfunctioning.

For weeks, state and county officials have been warning of long lines on Election Day, in part because of the new system and also because voters could register in person on Tuesday.

There were reports of two hour waits at several polling places throughout Los Angeles County, with poll workers directing voters to other sites that had equally long waits. Several machines reportedly failed, leaving many voting booths sitting empty and leading to even longer waits. At one polling place, a poll worker handed out candy to weary voters, and campaigns sent pizza to several voting sites at the University of California campuses

Former Vice President Joe Biden has won the Democratic presidential primary in Arkansas, according to multiple sources.

Arkansas, home of Eureka Springs, the so-called “Little Switzerland” of the Ozarks, will award 31 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

We’re not totally clear on if or how the young man standing behind Bernie Sanders’ right shoulder is related to the Vermont senator, but That Sweater looks like it fell right out of a John Hughes movie and we at Mother Jones Election HQ can’t stop staring at it. (And admiring it!) Our only regret is that Sanders himself doesn’t rock that look more often.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has won the Colorado Democratic primary, according to multiple sources.

Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana and to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, will award 67 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has won the Tennessee Democratic presidential primary, according to multiple sources.

Sixty-four delegates are at stake in Tennessee, the birthplace of Dolly Parton and site of the 1982 World’s Fair.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

Since Mike Bloomberg jumped late into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his entire campaign has been a grand political experiment predicated on a single question: Can the former New York City mayor’s immense wealth and record of philanthropy for progressive causes allow him to upend the traditional primary process, secure the nomination, and enable him to go on to beat Trump?

There’s a reason, after all, that Bloomberg launched his presidential campaign in a small diner in Norfolk, Virginia, in late November last year. Just weeks earlier, the state made history when Democrats swept into majority control of the state legislature, marking the first time the party has had full command of the state government in more than 25 years. Bloomberg, or at least his money, was a big reason for that. 

Following that launch, he spent half a billion dollars of his own money to make damn sure that everyone in the 14 Super Tuesday states—including Virginia!—knew it. Now the votes are in and we finally know how this experiment is going: Not that well, it turns out. 

While results are still rolling in, Bloomberg seems poised for a big loss in Virginia, in line for a third or fourth finish, while Biden is projected to win by a lot—an outcome that’s especially significant and a less-than-ideal sign for the rest of Bloomberg’s campaign. Of the Super Tuesday states, the Old Dominion was uniquely situated to measure the true power of Bloomberg.

Listen to MoJo reporters Tim Murphy and Fernanda Echarvarri explain Biden’s big night, Bernie’s long fight, and the knockdown fight for delegates to come, on this special edition of the Mother Jones Podcast:

More than any other candidate’s name, Bloomberg’s is nearly synonymous with the gun control movement and much of its progress. Everytown for Gun Safety—the gun rights coalition that Bloomberg co-founded and largely finances—spent $2.5 million in the state last cycle to elect Democrats who made gun control central to their campaigns, vastly outspending the National Rifle Association in its own backyard. Since then, the newly elected Democratic majority in the state has passed vital gun control legislation, much to the frustration of the state’s gun rights coalition. In turn, Bloomberg has become the avatar of their ire.

In short, gun control is a huge issue for both Virginia Democratic voters and elected officials—and no other candidate had a better standing with voters on the issue than Bloomberg. Plus, no candidate has literally spent close to as much money there: Bloomberg spent nearly $18 million on ads in Virginia alone, whereas Biden spent barely more than $300,000. He also put in face time, stumping hard in the state in the past few days—especially in Northern Virginia, where he held a  “Women for Mike” event on Saturday and participated in a Fox News town hall on Monday. If Bloomberg was going to rock it anywhere, it should’ve been here.

While it’s not surprising that Biden’s post–South Carolina surge carried over into Virginia, it probably doesn’t make Bloomberg’s loss sting any less. But as Bloomberg said at that Fox News town hall, he doesn’t care if he’s losing states like Virginia. “The most likely scenario for the Democratic Party is no one has a majority—it goes to a convention where there’s horse trading; there’s compromise,” he said. “It doesn’t even have to be the leading candidate. It could be the one with a smaller number of delegates.”

(Also, for what it’s worth, Bloomberg’s big spending in Virginia really won’t hit his wallet hard. In case you need a reminder from my colleagues, he’s very, very rich.)