NBC News Exit Poll: How voters in five southeastern states break down on race, ideology

A lot of attention is focused on California and Texas as the two biggest prizes in the primary calendar. But 393 pledged delegates, or nearly 3 in 10 of those up for grabs on Super Tuesday, will come from six southeastern states voting today. These voters look different from the rest of the pack, according to early NBC News Exit Poll results in five of those six states: Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia. These differences could impact the overall results for the night.

In some ways, the southeastern states look a lot like Texas. For example, they tend to have more moderate and conservative voters in their Democratic primary electorate — 45 percent in the five Southeast states and 41 percent in Texas — than California does.

The southeastern states differ from both these large states in their racial makeup with a larger black electorate, 27 percent overall, than either Texas, 20 percent, or California, seven percent. But those states have relatively few Latino voters in comparison. 

Texas progressives holding out hope for a Sanders win

HOUSTON — Progressive voters in Texas say they feel good about Sanders’ chances despite Biden’s win in South Carolina and Monday’s endorsements from ex-candidates Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke.

“I don’t believe that’s going to have an actual impact,” said Stevens Orozco, a teacher who is part of a wave of young progressive candidates running for Congress against Democratic incumbents. “At the grassroots level, all of the real excitement and momentum is for Bernie, and I absolutely believe he can still win Texas.”

Orozco, 33, is challenging Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a 13-term Democrat who was elected to Congress when Orozco was 8 year old. Although Jackson Lee, 70, is regarded as one of the most liberal members of Congress from Texas, Orozco spent Tuesday urging Democratic to vote for change.

Manny Edwards, a 20-year-old University of Houston student who was voting in his first presidential primary, said he and most of his friends were backing Sanders and other progressive candidates.

“Bernie is the only candidate who actually stands for something, and that’s why he’s going to win,” said Edwards, noting that some of his family members lacked health insurance. “I don’t think it’s radical that everyone should be able to have health care.”

Michael Saldana, 26, said he was annoyed by those who’ve argued that Sanders wouldn’t fare well in the general election. After seeing friends’ homes destroyed in Hurricane Harvey in 2017, he said he was supporting candidates who supported the aggressive efforts to combat climate change.

“I think Sanders can get it done,” he said.

Robocalls in Texas push wrong day for Democratic primary

Robocalls falsely telling Texas voters that the state’s primaries were scheduled for Wednesday, and not Tuesday, were reported several times to the Texas secretary of state on Tuesday.

Stephen Chang, director of communications for Secretary of State Ruth Hughs, said the calls claimed that “R’s, D’s and I’s vote tomorrow.” 

Chang said authorities are being “proactive” in addressing the calls but did not specify what was being done. He said the Secretary of State’s Office first received reports of robocalls Tuesday afternoon. He could not provide an estimate of how many reports the office received or how many robocalls had been made.

Reports of the false robocall prompted a tweet from the office’s verified Twitter account warning against misinformation about the call.

Claire Barnett, a Democratic candidate for Texas State House District 122, had just left her polling station  when she got the call telling her that the “Democratic primary is scheduled for tomorrow.”

“It was a local number in San Antonio. (The call) seemed designed to suppress the vote,” she said.  

Jonathan Coen, a Houston-area resident, received the robocall from the same number at 1:24 p.m. CT. Coen said his wife, who is hispanic, also received a call telling her to vote on a different day. 

“It was a woman’s voice recorded in Spanish, roughly [saying] ‘voting is important; the election is Wednesday,’” Coen said.

The phone call in Spanish came from a Houston-area number, he said. It is unclear whether the English call and Spanish call are connected, and the scope of the calls is not yet clear.

NBC News Exit Poll: Only about half of Massachusetts voters think Warren has best shot to beat Trump

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren faces a tough challenge in her home state tonight from neighboring Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the liberal lane. She’s also contending with late-breaking momentum behind Joe Biden’s candidacy, particularly with moderate and conservative voters.

Warren struggled on the campaign trail to prove her viability in the general election. That issue dogs her even in her home state.

Among those voting for Warren in the Massachusetts primary so far tonight, only about half say she’s the candidate with the best chance to beat Trump in the general election, according to early NBC News Exit Poll results. About 9 in 10 of Biden voters see the former vice president as having the best shot, compared to 7 in 10 of Sanders supporters who say the same about their pick.

NBC News Exit Poll: Super Tuesday voters in Maine and Vermont cite health care as most important issue

Health care is a top issue for voters in Maine and Vermont, according to early results from the NBC News Exit Poll. 

Roughly half of Maine’s Democratic primary voters name health care as the most important issue in deciding their vote, along with 40 percent of Vermont’s primary voters. Climate change came in second in both states, followed by income inequality.

Similar shares of those who voted for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in Vermont and Maine said health care was the most important issue. But nearly twice as many of Sanders’ voters named income inequality as a top issue compared with Biden’s voters in the two states. 

Voter website outages not a sign of cyberattack, officials say

Reports that some voter information websites across the country are experiencing outages are not a sign of any sort of cyberattack, a senior government official said Tuesday afternoon.

In a press conference at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the agency’s director, Chris Krebs, said issues accessing websites that inform voters how and where to cast their ballots were due to a surge of interest from voters.

The Texas Secretary of State’s website, for instance, was partially inaccessible for more than an hour Tuesday morning. Sites in California, Oklahoma and Minnesota also experienced minor issues. 

“You’ve probably seen some of the issues in voter lookup tools in California, voter lookup tools in Texas,” Krebs said. “What we expect, and what you need to take away from this, is that these are intermittent IT issues that are resolved.”

NBC News Exit Poll: Liberals account for more than 6 in 10 Super Tuesday voters

Liberal voters are dominating the electorate in Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primaries across the country, according to the NBC News Exit Poll conducted in 12 of the 14 Super Tuesday states.

Sixty-two percent of voters in Tuesday’s primaries consider themselves liberal. This includes a quarter of voters who describe themselves as “very liberal.”

That puts the Super Tuesday electorate ideologically on par with voters in three of the four Democratic presidential contests held thus far: Liberals accounted for more than 60 percent of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Last Saturday’s primary in South Carolina featured a more moderate electorate: Liberals accounted for just half of those voters.

NBC News Exit Poll: Young and liberal, LGBTs are 10 percent of today’s electorate

One out of every 10 people voting in today’s presidential primaries identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to the NBC News Exit Poll conducted in 12 of the 14 Super Tuesday states across the country.

Reflecting changing generational attitudes about sexuality and gender identity, LGBT Democratic voters are substantially younger than today’s electorate as a whole. A third of LGBT people voting on Super Tuesday are younger than 30 years old, while 65 percent of the LGBT voters today are under 45.

LGBT Super Tuesday voters are a strikingly liberal group: Exactly half of LGBT voters today call themselves “very liberal” and another 30 percent say they are “somewhat liberal.” Just 4 percent of LGBT Democratic voters say they are conservative.

Some Los Angeles voters cast begrudging ballots for Biden

Joe Gallagher voted on Super Tuesday for former Vice President Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary contest, but he’s not thrilled about it.

“It’s too bad because Bernie is the best candidate probably in 30 years,” Gallagher, 65, told NBC News after he left a polling center in West Hollywood. “I really am embarrassed not to vote for him, but I felt like I had no choice.” 

Gallagher said he did a lot of research into polling and decided about two months ago that Biden was the most electable Democrat running. 

His sentiment was shared by other voters around Los Angeles. 

“My objective and goal is to get Trump out of office,” said Tara, 26, who strongly supports Elizabeth Warren. But on Tuesday morning, she too decided to vote for Biden.

Tara concluded after talking to friends that the race was quickly becoming one between Biden and Bernie Sanders, and she didn’t want to get behind Sanders.

“It took much deliberation, and I’m not so happy,” Tara said, “but I think, unfortunately, voting for Warren may be a wasted vote that I don’t want to do, even though I love Warren.” 

Still, voters like Naz, 41, are sticking with Sanders, a candidate he sees as an antidote to President Donald Trump’s policies. 

“It’s nice to see someone try to take this country to the very far left, since Trump has taken it to the far right, because I think America is too far in the middle,” Naz explained. “I think Bernie will take it far left, which will balance out this country a bit.”