Democratic Primaries 2020

The 2020 Democratic Primaries were quite the race with COVID-19 raging across the country, leading to a host of changes across the country. Some primaries, like New York were rescheduled (the state board of elections even briefly cancelled them), and others like Wisconsin had severe accomodation issues, where only 5 out of 180 poll sites were open in Millwauke. Amongst this chaos, Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee. He had a slow start, but things rapidly changed with a big win in South Carolina, and then endorsments from Buttigieg and Klobuchar just before Super Tuesday. Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg also both ended their campaigns, leaving Biden and Sanders alone to finish the race. A month later, after the primaries in Wisconsin, Sanders also suspended his campaign , leaving Biden the de facto nominee.





February 3rd: Iowa

Iowa was hotly contested with Sanders narrowly winning the popular vote.
(Sanders 26% Buttigieg 25% Warren 20% Biden 14% Klobuchar 12%) Despite winning the popular vote, Buttigieg garnerned 14 delegates followed by Sanders with 12, Warren with 8 and Biden with 6.

February 11th: New Hampshire

Once again, Sanders and Buttigieg were again the front runners, taking 26% and 24% of the vote respectively, and both acquiring 9 more pledged delegates. Amy Klobuchar also had an impressive performance taking in 20% of the vote and 6 more delegates.

February 22nd: Nevada

Sanders took Nevada cleanly with 40% of the vote and 24 delegates. Biden and Buttigieg also got a few delegates, Biden 9 and Buttigieg 3, with 19% and 17% of the popular vote respectively. Warren got 12% of the vote but no delegates.

February 29th: South Carolina

Biden won South Carolina cleanly with 48% of the vote and capture 39 delegates. Sanders captured 20% of the vote for 15 delegates. With this, Biden was hot on Sanders heals.

Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday brought many surprises as Buttigieg and Klobuchar suddenly dropped out in the race and endorsed Biden. With that, Biden took all of the south, while Sanders won the largest state, California. Also of note was Texas, which was a close race: Biden 35% with 111 delegates, Sanders 30% with 102 delegates, Bloomberg 14% with 14 delegates and Warren 11% with 5 delegates.

March 10th: Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Washington

Biden cleanly won the two southern states, Mississippi and Missouri. Moreover, he also won Michigan, which was a blow to Sanders.

March 17th: Arizona, Florida and Illinois

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to shut down cities, Biden took 3 solid wins in Arizona, Florida and Illinois.

April 7th: Wisconsin

After Republican leaders forced the primary to occur in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, Milwaukee saw extraordinary lines with 180 poll sites reduced to just 5 . Meanwhile, rural, more conservative parts of the site saw little to no impact on their ability to turn out and cast a vote. The next day, Sanders announced he was ending his campaign.

Methodology

I created this infographic using data from the Wikipedia . I processed the data and reformated it using Python and Pandas. From there, I then created this map using d3 and javascript.