- Former Vice President Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in Florida in a landslide.
- Biden handily defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders by almost 40 percentage points, winning every single county in the state.
- Florida has 219 delegates up for grabs, and Biden was an overwhelming favorite in the state according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages leading up to the vote.
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Former Vice President Joe Biden has won the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in Florida, trouncing Sen. Bernie Sanders in a landslide victory.
Biden’s strong performance in “The Sunshine State” marks yet another dominant performance from his campaign in the South. In addition to the Florida victory, Biden won North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia, among others.
Florida Democratic primary results:
Turnout in the state was way up from 2016 voter totals.
Our decision desk expects turnout for the Florida Dem primary will end up around 2.25 million. In 2016, it was 1.7 million.
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) March 17, 2020
Catch up on live coverage from the primary:
Check out what's going on in primaries elsewhere here.
- Going into Tuesday's primaries, former Vice President Joe Biden had won 864 pledged delegates to the Democratic convention in July, leading Sen. Bernie Sanders' 705. 1,991 delegates are needed to secure a majority and the nomination without a potentially contested convention.
- During Sunday night's debate, Biden pledged to select a woman as his running mate should he win the nomination.
- Biden's commanding lead in recent primaries suggests that the Democratic electorate is more focused on beating Trump than in Sanders' proposed ambitious democratic socialist platform.
- Tuesday's primaries come amid a growing coronavirus pandemic. Louisiana announced on Friday that it would be postponing the Democratic primary there, originally scheduled for April 4, for over two months.
Here's how Democrats will elect their presidential nominee over the next several months
What's at stake in the primary?
Florida has 219 pledged delegates on the table. Of those 219 pledged delegates, 143 are pledged proportionally to presidential contenders based on the results in each of Florida's 27 congressional districts, while 76 delegates are pledged based on the statewide primary vote.
Among the congressional districts, the biggest prizes were the 20th, 21st, and 22nd districts, with seven delegates up for grabs in each. The 20th district is a geographically large landmass located in southeast Florida, while the 21st and 22nd districts are clustered to its East. These three districts encompass Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Coral Springs, Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, and more.
As of Tuesday night, Decision Desk HQ in partnership with the University of Virginia Center for Politics projected that Biden won at least 129 of Florida's pledged delegates compared to 33 so far for Sanders.
As in most other states, candidates must earn over the minimum threshold of 15% of the vote in a given district or statewide to earn any delegates. While this was a major factor in earlier primaries when there were still several candidates in the running, now that the race has largely consolidated into a two-way affair between Biden and Sanders, the 15% threshold played a less important role in Tuesday's elections.
This is what the polling said ahead of the Florida primary:
According to Real Clear Politics' average of the latest polling data, Biden held a clear lead in the state, with the support of 65.4% of voters to Sanders' 22.6%.
According to FiveThirtyEight's primary election forecast, Biden had a greater than 99% chance of winning the most votes in Florida. FiveThirtyEight projected that Biden's probable victory would likely translate into winning just more than two-thirds of the delegates up for grabs in the state and its congressional districts.