Most analysts have been dividing the Democratic field into lanes in order to dissect what's happening in the 2020 primary, namely placing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the progressive/liberal lane and most of the other candidates—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar—in the moderate lane. (Mike Bloomberg is in some weird “billionaires buy elections” lane).
So most of the chatter around Buttigieg's exit from the race Sunday (and now Klobuchar’s exit Monday) has assumed that all of their "moderate" voters will instead move into Biden's corner. However, that’s a rather simplistic reading and likely only partially true. Looking at the results from South Carolina, a third category of voters appears to be both very real and voting in high numbers: Democrats looking for an alternative to both Bernie and Biden.
The Washington Post's Dave Weigel notes that the "biggest turnout surge" in the Palmetto State came in the 1st Congressional District, which runs along about 100 miles of coastline from north of Charleston down to Hilton Head. It's an affluent area with a high concentration of white voters that has historically been a Republican stronghold, though freshman Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham flipped the seat blue in 2018. Since South Carolina has an open primary, some conservative-leaning voters likely participated in Saturday’s contest. (The Post reports that statewide only 5% of voters identified as Republican, while nearly a quarter of them identified as “independent or something else.”)
In Charleston and Beaufort counties, which accounted for the majority of new voters, both Biden and Sanders underperformed their statewide numbers as voters settled on one of three other alternatives: Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar.
"There is a substantial bloc of white, liberal suburbanites who are seeking a fresh alternative to Biden or Sanders, and they simply can't make a decision," wrote Weigel. "If there was a winner in this bracket [Saturday], it was arguably Warren. Exit polling found her running far stronger with voters who made up their minds 'in the last few days,' getting 11 percent of those voters while getting just four percent of early deciders."
But with both Buttigieg and Klobuchar leaving the field, Super Tuesday voters who prefer a Biden/Sanders alternative will no longer be dividing their loyalties. Bloomberg may figure into that "alternative" equation to some extent, but more than likely voters who were already choosing between Warren/Buttigieg/Klobuchar won't suddenly revert to the race's quasi-Democratic billionaire option.
Additionally, Warren's favorability rating among Democratic voters continues to be high. "Warren also came out of the race with the highest favorable ratings of any surviving candidate except for Biden: a 12-point net favorability rating, to eight points for Sanders and seven points for Buttigieg," Weigel noted.