Live Updates From the 2020 Democratic Primary in Arizona, Florida and Illinois – The New York Times

The Democratic primary race moved to Arizona, Florida and Illinois on Tuesday, with 441 delegates at stake for the party’s presidential nomination.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders in polling in all three states, could build an all-but-insurmountable lead in delegates from Tuesday’s contests. Mr. Biden currently has 894 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 743. Mr. Sanders lost all three states voting on Tuesday to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

The polls begin to close in Florida at 7 p.m. Eastern; all polls will be closed there at 8 p.m. Polls close in Illinois at 8 p.m. Eastern, and in Arizona at 10 p.m. Eastern.

These are the first primaries to be held amid the heightened fear and restrictions triggered by the coronavirus. The Trump administration has recommended avoiding groups of more than 10 people, and turnout was down in both Illinois and Florida on Tuesday. But many voters had already cast ballots early or by mail, including many older voters at risk to the virus.

By the end of the night, we will probably have an idea who won tonight’s contests — and yet there will be no rallies for the winner or winners.

Presidential politics in the coronavirus era has left Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders in a new reality. They’re running for president, but without the running.

There are no get-out-the-vote efforts, no rallies, no commercials, no fund-raising events and, for the foreseeable future, nowhere for them to go.

Ohio was supposed to have a primary today, but the governor ordered precincts closed. Louisiana, Kentucky and Maryland have moved primaries planned for the coming weeks back to June in hopes the pandemic subsides by then. Democratic National Committee officials insist the party’s convention will take place as planned in Milwaukee in July, but the truth is nobody really knows what the world will look like in four days, let alone in four months.

Usually we’d know after a primary what comes next. If tonight’s contests were unfolding under normal circumstances, the campaigns and the political press would be decamping for Georgia, which was supposed to be the only state with a primary next week.

But Georgia officials on Saturday moved their state’s primary to May 19. There will be no campaigning in the Atlanta suburbs, no tracking TV spending by the campaigns. No more counting the delegates Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders need to accumulate to clinch the presidential nomination.

Instead, we’re all left waiting and wondering the same thing: What comes next?

Tuesday is shaping up to be the weirdest Primary Day in memory.

With fears over the coronavirus pandemic freezing people in their homes, primary turnout is way down in Illinois, down a little bit in Florida and up in Arizona — thanks in large part to Arizonans relying far more on early voting and mailed-in ballots.

And in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine postponed today’s primary just before midnight on Monday — defying a court order and shuttering polling places.

What all of this will mean for the results of Tuesday’s contests is profoundly unclear.

For a week, there hasn’t been any campaigning in the traditional sense. Mr. Sanders hosted a “virtual rally” Monday night with an online concert from the rocker Neil Young. On Tuesday morning, his campaign announced it was not doing traditional get-out-the-vote outreach in states holding primary contests that day.

All the pre-primary polling showed Mr. Biden with wide leads over Mr. Sanders in each of the states voting today.

But what does low turnout mean in Illinois and Florida? Steve Schale, a longtime political operative in Florida who is a senior official in Mr. Biden’s super PAC, said the people voting by mail in Florida skewed older, so a low Primary Day turnout might not help Mr. Sanders.

In Illinois, turnout is less than half of what it was for the 2016 primary and figures to be below even the 2012 numbers, when only a Republican primary was on the ballot in a heavily Democratic state. About 200 Chicago precincts had to be moved in recent days, and some of the replacement locations did not open on time Tuesday.

“We certainly weren’t anticipating this crisis,” said Jim Allen, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. “This has been a very challenging time.”

Only Arizona, where the vast majority of voters cast their ballots before Tuesday, figured to have normal or slightly increased turnout.

Adrian Fontes, the Maricopa County recorder, who oversees elections for about 60 percent of the state’s voters and a larger share of its Democrats, said the number of early ballots received in his county was larger than that total number of votes in the 2016 Democratic primary. Any votes cast or counted Tuesday would push the number even higher.

Still, Mr. Fontes characterized Primary Day traffic at polling places as “slow.” All polling places in the county, which has nearly four million residents, were operating Tuesday morning, but the pace of voting was about 3,500 people per hour — far below normal.

Mr. Biden now has Secret Service protection, the organization said on Tuesday, a development that comes as he has achieved front-runner status in the Democratic primary, and after several security incidents occurred at campaign events.

“The U.S. Secret Service can confirm that we have initiated full protective coverage for Democratic Presidential Candidate and former Vice President Joseph Biden,” a representative for the Secret Service said.

On a number of occasions, voters or activists have come physically close to Mr. Biden or his family, including on Super Tuesday, when animal rights activists moved toward him and his wife as he spoke, and several young campaign staff members physically interceded.

With states postponing upcoming primaries to avoid congregating during the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic National Committee’s chairman, Tom Perez, on Tuesday urged the states remaining on the election calendar to conduct only vote-by-mail contests.

“In order to ensure the voices of voters are heard, the D.N.C. is urging the remaining primary states to use a variety of other critical mechanisms that will make voting easier and safer for voters and election officials alike,” Mr. Perez said. “The simplest tool is vote by mail, which is already in use in a number of states and should be made available to all registered voters.”

Mr. Perez condemned Ohio’s eleventh-hour decision to postpone its primary. Doing so would not be necessary, he said, if voters could cast ballots by mail.

“What happened in Ohio last night has only bred more chaos and confusion, and the Democratic Party leadership in Ohio is working tirelessly to protect the right to vote,” he said. “Eligible voters deserve certainty, safety and accessibility. That’s why states that have not yet held primary elections should focus on implementing the aforementioned measures to make it easier and safer for voters to exercise their constitutional right to vote, instead of moving primaries to later in the cycle when timing around the virus remains unpredictable.”

All eyes are on the presidential primary, of course, but there are also several important down-ballot races happening in Illinois today.

The most closely watched is the primary in the Third Congressional District between Representative Daniel Lipinski, a conservative Democrat, and Marie Newman, a progressive challenger. It is a second try for Ms. Newman, who is backed by the Justice Democrats and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York: She lost to Mr. Lipinski by just 2,000 votes in 2018.

The primary will be an important test of whether someone like Mr. Lipinski, who opposes abortion and voted against the Affordable Care Act, is still welcome in the Democratic Party — and conversely, whether a candidate from the party’s progressive wing can win in a district that, while solidly Democratic, leans more conservative on social issues.

Across the aisle, Republicans will be choosing their challengers against two first-term Democrats who flipped seats in 2018: Sean Casten in the Sixth District and Lauren Underwood in the 14th. And both parties are holding primary elections for an open seat in the 15th District, where Representative John Shimkus, a Republican, is retiring.

We’ll also be keeping an eye on the state attorney’s race in Cook County, home to Chicago. It has been the most expensive such race in county history and pits the incumbent, Kim Foxx, against three challengers. The most well-funded of the three is Bill Conway, a former prosecutor.

Tuesday’s contests aren’t expected to be good for Mr. Sanders. There are large concentrations of older voters, black voters and suburbanites who have flocked to Mr. Biden in the states that have voted so far.

After losing Michigan by 16 percentage points despite going all-in on his campaign there, the Vermont senator faces the prospect of losing Arizona, Florida and Illinois by wide margins. He’s been far behind in public polling and, after in-person campaigning, has been shuttered since the emergence of the coronavirus and has had no public appearances besides Sunday night’s debate.

With even some allies now admitting that Mr. Sanders’s path to the nomination has narrowed to a shut, only a shocking upset in at least one state has the potential to change the trajectory of the 2020 presidential race.

Short of that, Mr. Sanders will be left in a state of suspended animation — far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate race with no upcoming primaries or caucuses to alter the state of the race, at least not until coronavirus concerns pass.

With in-person campaigning frozen indefinitely by the virus, the importance of advertising and free news media coverage is most likely going to be of heightened importance going forward.

A combined more than $21 million in television ads has been spent in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio — and in every state, Mr. Sanders spent more than Mr. Biden and his supportive super PAC combined. The priciest state, by far, is Florida, where Mr. Sanders had poured nearly $6 million and Mr. Biden spent $5.3 million, despite polling in March that has shown Mr. Biden with a large lead in the state. Mr. Sanders is the bigger spender online, too.

In the past seven days, Mr. Sanders has spent about $247,000 on Facebook ads in Illinois — nearly five times the $53,000 that Mr. Biden spent. It was a similar story across all four states, with Mr. Sanders ($106,000) far outpacing Mr. Biden (nearly $20,000) in Arizona and doubling him in Florida.

Mr. Biden has members of Congress, a governor and local political figures advocating for him to voters in Arizona, Florida and Illinois.

Mr. Sanders had Neil Young play a live streamed “digital rally” on his website on Monday night.

Virtually the entire Democratic political establishment has rallied behind Mr. Biden as the best hope to unseat President Trump, a migration that both signals to voters that the party has chosen its candidate and validates the Sanders argument that he’s fighting entrenched interests from both Republicans and Democrats.

While Mr. Biden has had an array of local elected officials participate in conference calls and online forums appealing to local voters, the lone elected official in a state voting on Tuesday that Mr. Sanders invited on with the Canadian-born Mr. Young — who became a U.S. citizen in January — was Representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Illinois, a Chicagoan who is one of just 10 members of Congress who have endorsed Mr. Sanders.

Lacking prominent endorsers has long been a feature of Mr. Sanders’s politics. By holding rallies with thousands of supporters, he’s demonstrated that masses of people aren’t waiting to be told by other elected officials who to vote for.

But the shutdown of American life in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has left Mr. Sanders without the evidence of his movement’s power. On Tuesday, voters will render a judgment of how strong that leaves him.

Maggie Astor, Nick Corasaniti, Katie Glueck and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.