VOX
Super Saturday is mostly a dumb name made up by television networks to try to persuade you to waste a Saturday night staying home and watching election results on TV. There aren't a ton of delegates at stake in the five states that voted Saturday night, and many of the races were idiosyncratic caucuses where the results may be telling us more about candidates' ground games and organization than their actual popularity. Nobody remotely resembling Ted Cruz has ever won an election in Maine, for example, and we can be pretty confident that his success in the state's caucus does not show that it has suddenly become a devoutly religious state that demands ideological rigor from its politicians.
Still, the races do matter and this weekend delivered us a number of surprises on the Republican side.
Ted Cruz
The junior senator from Texas won the old-fashioned way Saturday night — by getting enough people to vote for him that he could win some states. Despite a decent performance on Super Tuesday that left him in second place in the overall delegate count, Cruz was largely written off as a southern niche candidate who had already run and lost in too many non-Texas southern states to seriously challenge Donald Trump. Wins in Kansas and Maine challenge that assumption and make his earlier victory in Alaska look less fluky. As icing on the cake, Trump's wins in Kentucky and Louisiana proved narrower than expected with Louisiana in particular showing that Cruz did much better with people who voted on election day than with people who'd locked their decision in earlier with early voting.
Marco Rubio
Rubio absolutely tanked. He was taking 11 percent in Louisiana, 17 percent in Kansas, 17 percent in Kentucky and just 8 percent in Maine. Those are four of his six worst showings so far on the primary calendar. In Maine, Rubio finished fourth and didn't even win a single delegate. In Louisiana, he's on-track to finish well shy of the 20 percent threshold for delegates. The case for Rubio is getting less and less convincing. As it becomes clear that people don't actually want to vote for him, he risks rapid abandonment by his establishment supporters.
Bernie Sanders
Sanders won two states tonight — Kansas and Nebraska — and only lost one. His campaign is declaring victory and to his supporters...it certainly seems to feel like a victory.
But in reality, he is losing.
Kansas and Nebraska combine to offer 58 delegates while Louisiana carries 51. Clinton's margin of victory in her state was much bigger than Sanders' in either of his states, so it is entirely possible that when all is said and done she will have won more delegates than he did.
More to the point, with every passing election that Sanders does not alter the fundamental demographics of the race it becomes clearer and clearer that he is drawing dead in this campaign. We've seen time and again that Sanders can beat Clinton in states that have overwhelmingly white Democratic parties.
His problem is that there aren't enough white Democrats to make this strategy work.
So far, Clinton has won every contest in a state where the African-American share of the population is over eight percent (she's also won Iowa). The Sanders campaign has characterized these as "red states" and it's true that so far that's mostly meant southern states. But Virginia isn't red, and Massachusetts isn't in the South. The problem for Sanders is that Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Indiana are still outstanding with black population shares over 8 percent. California's African-American population is on the small side, but due to giant Asian and Hispanic populations it's one of the least-white states in the union.
Donald Trump
He still won two of four states on Saturday night, and both of them -- Louisiana and Kentucky -- are Southern states where Cruz was supposed to do well, thanks to his strength among evangelical Christians. Trump also won the night's marquee contest -- the Louisiana primary -- in Cruz's backyard. What's more, Trump won the two biggest states. Cruz might have new life thanks to the closeness of Louisiana and Kentucky, but Trump is still winning the big prizes and heading toward the GOP nomination. We'll see if that changes.