The most interesting fight in Georgia’s Tuesday primary may be the race for second place.
With Republican Donald Trump holding a commanding lead in polls of the state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are competing to make a strong enough showing to gain a share of the state’s delegates.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s rout of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday provides a good indicator of how Georgia voters will swing on Tuesday. Sanders campaign hopes to keep it closer than the nearly 50-point spread he lost in the state, though he’s spending the final hours before the vote rallying voters in the Northeast and Midwest.
Rubio will return to Atlanta Monday to make a final pitch to Peach State voters, just two days after he and Cruz held near-simultaneous events in the city. Yet he’ll have to compete for attention with Trump, who will headline a rally at Valdosta State University on Monday night.
And candidates near the bottom of the pack continue to soldier on. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson made a pilgrimage to Rock Springs Church late Sunday in Milner, following in the footsteps of two other presidential candidates who already visited the sprawling campus.
The clustering of a dozen primaries and caucuses on Tuesday was always expected to be a big moment in the race for the presidency. Now it seems primed to give a giant boost to Trump and lift Clinton, a former secretary of state, over her more liberal opponent.
Both hold an edge in many of the polls in Georgia and the sweep of other mostly Southern states in the Super Tuesday vote, dubbed the SEC primary. Georgia, Texas and five other states south of the Mason-Dixon Line hold primaries on Tuesday, as do a range of other states from Alaska to Vermont.
Their leads are not insurmountable, since the first four contests offer relatively meager delegate hauls. But as voters in the bigger states of Texas, Illinois and Florida prepare to cast ballots - and award troves of delegates - their rivals are running out of time to catch up.
Tough math ahead for Trump rivals
Trump leads the Republican field in almost every Super Tuesday poll except for Texas, Cruz's home base and the biggest prize of the day with 172 delegates at stake. And some polls show that race has narrowed as the vote nears.
That complicates the math for his top rivals. In Georgia, for one, candidates can only get delegates if they reach 20 percent of the vote or if they finish first or second in one of Georgia’s 14 congressional districts.
Rubio essentially concedes he will not outright win any Super Tuesday contests, though he hopes to pick up enough delegates in states like Georgia by finishing above the threshold and winning a few more moderate districts. He aims to stay competitive until the race turns to his home state of Florida and other big winner-take-all states on March 15.
“We are seeing positive signs in Georgia and Tennessee. We’re in striking distance,” said Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who was stumping for Rubio in Georgia on Sunday. “Super Tuesday is where we gain momentum. We will continue to pick up delegates - this isn’t a sprint. This is a cross country run.”
Cruz’s strategy is similar, and he’s long called the religious conservatives of the SEC primary states his “firewall.” But exit polls in South Carolina, where he finished in third place, show a plurality of evangelicals have flocked instead to Trump. A similar outcome in Georgia, where he has a flock of endorsements and hundreds of volunteers, would shake his campaign.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, is pinning his hopes almost exclusively on his home state's winner-take-all contest on March 15. But Trump is fiercely competitive in his rivals' back yards, with recent polls showing him ahead of Kasich in Ohio and leading Rubio in his home state.
“Little Marco is doing not so well in Florida – he’s down about 20 points. The people in Florida can’t stand him,” Trump said Sunday on Fox News. “He couldn’t be elected dog catcher in Florida.”
Carson, meanwhile, is in fourth or fifth places in most polls of Georgia voters and is unlikely to win any of the state’s delegates. That didn’t stop him from returning to the state one more time. At his event Sunday, he told his life story to a cheering, at-capacity crowd of more than 1,300.
He focused more on his faith than his campaign and his remarks repeatedly earned standing ovations from the crowd.
“It really is not compassionate to pat people on the head and say ‘there, there you little thing. I’m going to take care of all your needs.’ All that does is keep people in a constant state of dependency. I don’t think that’s what God intended for us.”
Clinton’s South Carolina boost
Clinton’s decisive victory in South Carolina, the first state to vote where black voters make up a majority of the Democratic electorate, bodes well for her in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — all states where minorities make up a key portion of the party’s voter base.
Sanders, who said Sunday that he was “decimated” in South Carolina, has all but conceded the South to Clinton. His campaign is focusing its advertising dollars and his visits on friendlier territory in the Midwest and Northeast.
“No question Secretary Clinton won that state and she won it big,” Sanders said of his South Carolina loss Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “But I’m in Minnesota now, and I think we’ve got a real shot at Minnesota. I think we’ve got a real shot at Colorado, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and Vermont. So we’re looking to the future, not looking back.”
Since delegates are allocated proportionally, he needs to rack up big margins in states he wins while keeping close to Clinton in those he loses. But with bigger states that award delegates on a winner-takes-all basis voting on March 15, the odds are mounting.
“It’s a delegate race, and it comes to a point where you have to do the math. If you’re not winning the bulk of delegates, the path becomes much more narrow. And that’s what Sanders is running against,” said Jaime Harrison, the South Carolina Democratic party chair.
“He’s going to have to have some surprises on March 1 and take some states on March 15,” said Harrison. “And to win the nomination he’s going to have to take states with sizable African-American populations.”
About the Author
