Welcome to Majority.FM's AM QUICKIE! Brought to you by justcoffee.coop

TODAY'S HEADLINES:

There are hundreds of thousands of votes still to count, but it appears Bernie Sanders did not walk out of Super Tuesday with the result he was looking for. While Sanders did well in several western states, Joe Biden roared back into the race on the backs of his endorsement party last night, and is poised to win several states in the south and northeast.

Meanwhile, the Coronavirus is spreading despite all attempts to contain it. As it plays havoc on financial markets, some banks are trying to use the chaos to push for more deregulation.

And lastly, some overlooked stories on Super Tuesday: downballot races you might have missed.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

There’s no two ways around it: Super Tuesday did not go as well as it could have for Bernie Sanders.

Thanks in part to the new super-centrist coalition behind Joe Biden, the former VP surged to win nine states with one still hanging in the balance. Sanders, meanwhile, has secured the win in three but has a commanding lead in California, one of the biggest delegate hauls of the night.

As of early Monday morning, Biden had won Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota and Massachusetts, and has a narrow lead in Maine.

Sanders won Vermont, Utah and Colorado, and looks on track to win California, but it clearly wasn’t the showing he was hoping for.

Before you get too alarmed, however, Sanders’ strong showings in competitive big states like Texas means he’s still picking up a whole lot of delegates.

The New York Times has Biden with 667 delegates and Bernie with 587, but again, those numbers are just projections that will fluctuate as more of the vote comes in from the Western states.

Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, had another dismal night. But nevertheless, she persisted, sending out a message to supporters urging them to keep this quote “momentum” endquote going into the next round of primaries.

She hasn’t won a single state, so I’m not sure what momentum means in this context, other than her dropping out and endorsing Bernie doesn’t seem super likely in the near future!

And after dropping hundreds of millions of dollars, Michael Bloomberg managed to buy a handful of delegates and one outright primary win -- in American Samoa. He says he’ll reassess his campaign tomorrow.

I’d personally like him to assess giving me one million dollars and then retreating from public life forever, but as we saw last night, things don’t always go they way they should.

What this means, however, is that we’re effectively in a two candidate race. It’s Bernie versus Biden in an all-out slog to the convention. It’s a very different race than it was a week ago, but then again, that was a very different race than it was two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus… still looks bad! The death toll is up to nine people, all in Washington State, and a new report suggests that some initial deaths at a nursing home came on faster than previously reported.

The disease’s growing presence has already caused several peaks and valleys in global financial markets. Of course, some of the worse big bankers have decided to use this instability to push for less regulatory oversight.

CommonDreams reports that the heads of BPI, a lobbying group that represents a who’s who of the biggest banks in the country, asked the Federal Reserve to basically allow them to do a whole bunch of the lending that regulations have prevented them from doing -- for good reason. That includes cutting back on “stress tests” that the Fed performs to make sure the banks could handle a financial crisis, like, say, the one caused by a rapidly spreading virus.

Financial experts immediately blasted the move, calling it quote “transparently opportunistic.” Sounds like the big banks all right!

**Now that we’ve done an update to our impending national health crisis, let’s skip back to an aspect of Super Tuesday that might fall by the wayside: down ballot races outside of the Bernie-Biden showdown. **

Texas incumbent Democrat Harry Cuellar appears to have edged out progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, who was the chosen as Justice Democrats’s next attempt to get another AOC-type candidate in the house.

Other outspoken progressives or socialists are also struggling in Texas. DSA-member Heidi Sloan lost to slightly-more-mainstream progressive Julie Oliver, who also ran in 2018 and will get a second shot at toppling the Republican incumbent in her district.

There were signs of light, however: progressive lawyer Lulu Seikaly advanced to a run-off primary election with her nearest rival, fellow lawyer Sean McCaffity, in Texas’s 3rd district.

In California, meanwhile, Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur will not be representing the 25th district in Congress anytime soon. Leading Democrat Christie Smith and the leading Republican, defense contractor Mike Garcia, will advance to a runoff for the rest of former Rep. Katie Hill’s term, and then another for a new two-year term in a highly competitive district.

Keeping the House will be a major priority for Democrats come November -- but at least this year, there isn’t a clear victory for progressives like AOC’s upset of Joe Crowley in 2018.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

California officially had its driest February ever. In the entire month, some areas of the state saw not a single drop of rain, a dire sign of the climate change and one that could make the upcoming fire season more tragic than ever.

Tornadoes killed 25 people in Tennessee on Monday, devastating small towns across the center of the state and causing wreckage across a swathe of Nashville.

Virginia became the first southern state to ban licensed medical professionals from practicing conversion therapy on minors, which will hopefully end some cases of the still-widespread amoral practice.

The New York Times reports that some conservative communities are trying to become “sanctuary cities” for the anti-abortion movement, banning abortion in their local jurisdictictions.

And lastly, koalas may become endangered again, as a new report claims bushfires in Australia may have killed as many as 5,000 in New South Wales alone, bringing their numbers down by as much as two thirds.

That’s all for the AM Quickie today. We’ll have a lot more Super Tuesday content this afternoon as votes continue to come in and the delegate counts firm up.

#AMQuickie: Mar 4, 2020

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn