Joe Biden finally won a primary. That kept him alive through Super Tuesday, a landscape so bleak that Pete Buttigieg called it quits on Sunday afternoon, scrapping a rally in downtown Dallas two hours later.

With Sen. Bernie Sanders holding commanding leads in Texas and California, the biggest prizes on a day when one third of Democrats’ pledged delegates get awarded, pressure is mounting on the remaining also-rans.

The prospects are uncertain even for Biden, who had just two full days between his landslide in South Carolina and polls opening in 14 states from coast to coast, precious little time to leverage that jolt or consolidate support as the field narrows.

Mike Bloomberg has saturated Texas airwaves, drowning out him and everyone else.

And most Democrats planning to vote in the primary cast ballots early, before Saturday’s huge win restored Biden’s much-scuffed aura of electability. The former vice president was so strapped for cash and desperate for resurrection in South Carolina that he let a month slide without stumping in a Super Tuesday state — a streak he finally snapped on Sunday with stops in Alabama and Virginia.

He’ll stump Monday night at Gilley’s honkytonk near downtown, after a stop in Houston earlier in the day.

Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, had scheduled a 7:30 p.m. rally in downtown Dallas in Main Street Garden Park on Sunday night. But by 5 p.m. he was telling staff and supporters that he had decided not to go on and headed back home to make his announcement.

“I will do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January,” he told supporters.

The 38-year-old would have been the first gay president. He astonished pundits and infuriated some rivals by attracting so much support, despite elected experience limited to running the nation’s 308th biggest city.

“By every conventional wisdom, by every historical measure, we were never supposed to get anywhere at all,” Buttigieg said Sunday night.

His departure could help Biden and others competing for the centrist, anyone-but-Sanders mantle, a group that now includes only Bloomberg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

“We’re in contention, including in Texas,” Biden insisted on ABC’s This Week. “And Super Tuesday’s not the end. It’s only the beginning.”

But the realities were harsh as Biden peddled a comeback kid narrative.

More than 883,000 Texas Democrats cast ballots in early voting. That’s two-thirds the total in the 2016 primary. For them, Biden’s victory — after lackluster finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada — came too late to impress.

Sanders remains ahead in the delegate count and is likely to pull away on Tuesday, regardless of the clarion refusal of South Carolina Democrats to anoint a self-described democratic socialist.

“It’s a big boost. I think it starts a real comeback,” Biden said on Fox News Sunday, boasting that he’s now collected the most votes, if not the most delegates. “We have a long, long way to go. This is a marathon.”

In Texas, Sanders leads with 29% in a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas-Tyler poll released Sunday morning. Bloomberg has also overtaken Biden, claiming 21% with the former front-runner nipping at his heels with 19%.

That’s a drastic reversal of fortunes.

A month earlier, the same poll showed Biden leading Sanders 35-18 in Texas, with Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren tied at 16%.

The results track with a new NBC/Marist College poll that showed Sanders leading Biden 34-19 in Texas, with Bloomberg in third at 15%. North Carolina was a tossup.

Donors showered $5 million on Biden overnight, a critical infusion but still a rounding error for Bloomberg, who bought three-minute blocks on two TV networks Sunday night to address to the nation.

After skipping the first four contests, Tuesday’s primaries are the first with Bloomberg on the ballot, so he’ll soon learn what sort of return on investment he’s gotten for the hundreds of millions he’s poured into the race — more than $500 million just on advertising.

Bloomberg, the 12th wealthiest American, has hired an army of workers to organize an even bigger army of volunteers. Sanders has a residual network from 2016. Biden’s operation is modest. Supporters include three of the four black Texas Democrats in Congress.

He spent the morning on Sunday news shows, basking in the afterglow of South Carolina and raking in the free publicity.

“The Democratic Party is looking for a Democrat, not a socialist, not a former Republican,” he said on ABC’s This Week, jabbing at Sanders and Bloomberg. On CNN’s State of the Union, he insisted: “People aren’t looking for a revolution…. They’re looking for results.”

Socialism on the ballot

Sanders devoted last weekend to Texas, with four rallies in El Paso, San Antonio, Houston and Austin. As rivals play catch-up, he’s been able to turn his attention elsewhere.

With South Carolina behind them, candidates fanned out Sunday across the 14 Super Tuesday states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

Former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, a housing secretary in the Obama administration and an early casualty of the 2020 race, stumped for Warren in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, telling volunteers at the county party headquarters not to give up.

“She can do great here, and 95% of the delegates have not been awarded yet in this race. Nobody can tell you that it’s over or there’s a winner or that it’s a two person contest right now. Let’s have Texas have its say,” he said.

POLITICS

Joe Biden wins South Carolina, giving the former veep a potential springboard to Super Tuesday and beyond

BY TOM BENNING

At a rally in Houston on Saturday night, Warren cited last week’s stock market crash to argue that putting Sanders up against President Donald Trump would be risky.

“This crisis is a reminder that this primary isn’t a game,” she said. “We are picking a president — and we need someone whose core values can be trusted, who has a plan for how to govern, and who can actually get it done.”

Almost as much as Democrats want to oust Trump, many want to derail Sanders, an ideological outlier in their midst who promises free college and health care and an overhaul of the traditional social contract.

The Dallas Morning News/UT-Tyler poll found that by roughly 2-1, Texans have a negative view of socialism. The more conservative a voter is, the more likely their aversion.

“I hear over and over from my sensible Republican friends that there’s this massive middle that we want to be in,” said Ann Holland, a Highland Park homemaker who has been volunteering for Bloomberg, adding that none of those friends would ever vote for Sanders. “Bernie is trying to buy votes with my tax money – trying to give everyone free stuff that won’t ever happen.”

A dozen or so volunteers were staffing a Bloomberg phone bank in Dallas on Saturday afternoon, where they got a pep talk from senior campaign adviser Debbie Weir, a longtime Flower Mound resident and former CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“There are a lot of reluctant Republicans that really do want a moderate candidate to vote for because they’re very ambivalent about voting for Trump again,” said Weir, a leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a Bloomberg-backed group. “But they don’t want to vote for a socialist, either.”

Sanders supporters bristle at that argument.

“Everyone is misinformed about what socialism means,” said Christian Coplin, 21, a college sophomore from Alvin who attended a Sanders rally last weekend in Houston. “It means democracy in every way possible — economic, political, within the workplace.”

Sanders’ success, he said, shows that the stigma is fading as America moves further from the “dark cast of McCarthyism and the Cold War.”

Ryan Booker, a leader of the Houston branch of the group Socialist Alternative, handing out pamphlets outside that rally, also sees growing acceptance.

“People are increasingly understanding what is socialism really means — policies that benefit regular working people,” he said.

Bloomberg’s millions

Bloomberg accounts for roughly 70% of the TV ad spending in Texas, according to data from Advertising Analytics, a firm that tracks campaign spending.

His strategy is clear. More than a third of his outlay, $9 million, has gone to two Spanish-language ads aimed at Latinos.

One ad warns that Trump wants to eliminate Obamacare. The other, narrated by state Rep. César Blanco of El Paso, where a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart last summer, praises Bloomberg’s efforts to reduce gun violence.

Bloomberg has also spent $2.6 million in Texas airing an ad that features the mother of a New York firefighter killed in the line of duty, emotionally recounting the mayor’s vow to provide for her grandkids personally if the FDNY failed to live up to its obligations.

You might even have caught an ad that ran for a few weeks featuring TV’s Judge Judy attesting that he “would be a truly great president” based on a record of executive achievement and “impactful philanthropy.”

In a distant fourth place is Warren at $446,000, though that’s a dramatic uptick just in the last few days. She hits Bloomberg for trying to swamp Texas airwaves in one ad.

Her modest outlay bypasses Dallas and Houston, the biggest and costliest markets in Texas, using her far more limited resources to court votes in select state senate districts, picking up delegates here and there and perhaps leveraging that into the 15% needed to collect a share of the delegates awarded statewide.