The Atlantic reports:

For the past several months, Bloomberg has been the wild card. He made the risky move of skipping all four early nominating states to bet it all—or at least half a billion dollars of his personal fortune—on Super Tuesday. For a brief moment, the strategy seemed to be working. He rose to the top tier in polling for many of the contests. Then came a miserable Nevada debate and a reconsideration of how he would actually perform against Trump. The electability voters who once believed that Biden might self-destruct flooded back to the vice president. And early tonight, it became clear that Biden’s strongest constituency—black voters—would continue to support him in large numbers. According to Virginia exit polls, Biden won 63 percent of the black vote in that state, compared with 18 percent for Sanders and just 10 percent for Bloomberg.

“A lot of black voters, especially southern black voters, aren’t looking for a revolution,” Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, told The Atlantic in an interview tonight. “The reason why a lot of older black voters are conservative—as in, conservative in picking a candidate—is because they know what this country is capable of … Sure, some people will agree with the need for a revolution,” but many others may be wary.

The question of the night was how much the South Carolina victory and the endorsements that followed would matter for Biden. He had spent a fraction of the money his competitors had in Super Tuesday states—roughly $2.2 million against Sanders’s $18 million. In South Carolina, endorsements—and one endorsement in particular, that of Representative Jim Clyburn—had mattered. Clyburn is the power broker in the state; his “world famous” fish fry is a requirement for any candidate who hopes to be competitive there. According to cable-news exit polls, 47 percent of primary voters in the state said Clyburn’s endorsement was an important factor in their decision making. [Continue reading…]