By Michael Wood
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark – Today marks a very important day in the steps of deciding who will be the democratic nominee to run against President Trump for the Republicans. Today, fifteen total jurisdictions will host Super Tuesday. Voting has been taking place since this morning, in which over a third of the delegates will be given out. This years Super Tuesday features two of the most heavily populated states in the United States, California and Texas. With California awarding 494 delegates and Texas having its own 228, the winner of those states will heavily determine the eventual primary candidate.
Early voting has been taking place for some time but around a fourth of the states will award their delegates before the day is over. In all, 1,357 delegates will be given out. Since a candidate only needs 1,991 delegates to get the first ballot nomination, the results of today is a huge indication of who the eventual winner will be. In the past few days the race has heated up as some hopefuls have begun to drop out of the race. Both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race and threw their parties support behind Joe Biden. Senator Bernie Sanders currently holds a slim lead in the race over Biden, which means that every vote is important. Political Science Professor Andrew Dowdle at the U of A spoke about how close the current race is.
“Voting can sometimes be inconvenient, costly, and people end up looking at this and thinking ‘my votes not going to have any impact’ but, this year, because of the fact that it’s such a close margin a relatively small group of people can end up having a pretty big impact in terms of the race,” Dowdle said.
This year especially candidates have made an effort to campaign in the area. Mike Bloomberg opened a campaigning office nearby, and before dropping out Klobuchar had scheduled to speak this morning.
“This is one of the few times in recent decades where Arkansas doesn’t have a favorite daughter or a favorite son running in one of the primaries, so usually that ends up meaning that voters in Arkansas are going to vote disproportionately for this person, but at this point the results are wide open,” Dowdle said.
Arkansas only has 36 delegates to give out, but in a race that’s projected to be this close, every delegate is very important. At this point, Joe Biden is heavily predicted to get the win in Arkansas.