Sanders wins California primary, but Biden takes national lead

Although Bernie Sanders was the frontrunner entering Super Tuesday and won the California primary with 33 percent of the vote, the clear winner of yesterday’s election was former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden won nine of the 14 states voting, including Minnesota and Oklahoma, which were some of Sander’s previous victories in 2016. He also won over 39 percent in seven states and the third of the votes in three other states. In California, Biden garnered 25.1 percent of the votes and 95 delegates. He received 784,288 votes, coming short of only 300,000 votes from candidate Sanders.

He also defeated Sanders 34.5 percent to 30 percent in the other large state voting on Tuesday, Texas.

The voting resulted in Biden overtaking Sanders for the lead in delegates, 433 to 388. A majority of the nearly 4000 delegates that will be selected are needed to win the Democratic nomination.

In the aftermath of Super Tuesday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and  Sen. Amy Klobuchar have dropped out of the presidential race. Even after spending over $234 million on advertising, Bloomberg was unable to secure any of the states and soon dropped out. Klobuchar dropped out of the campaign to endorse Biden alongside Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Even though Sander’s previous 2016 campaign in Minnesota was successful, he couldn’t produce the same results during yesterday’s Super Tuesday. With Klobuchar leaving the election, Sanders was most likely to win, until Biden took the unexpected victory with no campaigns placed in the state.

Although beating Clinton previously by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin for Minnesota, Sanders won the state even though he never campaigned there.

Every state Sanders has won was by a smaller margin than he did four years ago.

The nation is changing the course of how the citizens would vote by implementing electronic machines to place their votes instead of ballots. Los Angeles County first introduced the system during yesterday’s election after testing it in mock elections held in September and November.

Many of the neighborhood polling places were replaced with regional voting centers. The machines were tested in November in a mock election, which led to many problems, including paper jams and incomplete error codes. According to the Los Angeles Times, Dean Logan, the architect of the $300 million voting system, said he made more improvements and built a fail safe if the machine failed during the voting process.

Nevertheless, Sanders took the majority votes with 33.9 percent even with the immense change. Biden came to a close second with 25 percent.