this article seems to imply a winner-take-all delegate outcome; the democratic primaries award delegates proportionally, so you don't "win california" so much as you split the delegates. so, what this polling is actually suggesting is that the split field will render california and texas meaningless to the top candidates - even as they strike a death blow to smaller ones, perhaps including buttigieg. buttigieg will need either warren or biden to drop, but the same could be said of warren or biden - they need other candidates to drop. it's currently a stalemate.

by the time march comes around, a lot of the smaller candidates will have no doubt dropped. but, that's really all that you get of value out of this polling - the obvious statement that you should expect that the smaller candidates will end up mathematically eliminated by this stage, or very close to it.

my own feeling is that texas is a loose cannon in the democratic party. it's such a conservative place, obviously. so, it's split between, on the one hand, this conservative and catholic latin-speaking minority, which is not dissimilar to other latin-speaking populations in the western hemisphere, and should probably lean republican in a sane reality, and, on the other hand, this geography-less young generation of hipster kids that is like urban kids everywhere else in the country, with the exception that it's actually substantially more wealthy. if the texas democratic party ends up dominated by the artist-driven politics that you see in places like austin, it could be an interesting laboratory to try out new theories in. if it ends up driven by the more conservative instincts of the latin-speaking population, it could revert to the kind of insular backwardsness that has marred the region since the waning years of the mexican empire. for right now, i don't see how a clear winner emerges out of this field in texas, or at least not in any way that isn't determined beforehand - none of these candidates will sweep either of these demographics, unless one or more of them drops. if somebody wins texas, they'll have already won, anyways.

likewise, i'd expect california to split. if the outcome of the 2016 primaries wasn't sobering enough to remind everybody of where the centre of california politics really is, i guess there's some people that'll just keep dreaming through anything. there's a lot of money in california, as well, and it knows what it's self-interests are. so, a candidate like biden will have a strong base in california that will not be interested in sanders or warren, and it is going to be strong enough to ensure that the vote splits. you should not hope for a big sanders or warren victory in california - that won't happen. however, the one candidate that may actually have a chance at winning california is buttigieg, if biden drops and buttigieg gets most of his support. buttigieg could conceivably convince cultural liberals to vote for him in a way that sanders could never succeed in doing to the bourgeoisie. but, i would consider this obscure - expect california to split

this is why areas with more homogeneous populations are targeted by campaigns - they are selected for by the rules. you'll never get 80% of the vote in california by dominating with a single demographic like you will in south carolina or minnesota.

if there was a place in the united states where the latin-speaking population truly dominated the primary, it would no doubt develop the same kind of strategic importance. however, it doesn't currently exist, and current trends in the southwest might actually lean towards asian culture being the longer term winner in terms of demography - so it's not clear that it will ever happen, either.

what we've seen in the primaries for a long time is the strategic importance of winning homogeneously black areas in the southeast. i'm suggesting - and trump proved it - that the only real strategic counterfoil to this is to win homogeneously white areas by similarly large margins. if there were enough states that had latin-speakers voting in similar proportions in the primaries, sweeping those states could conceivably act as a comparable counterfoil, sure. but, that doesn't exist. what exists are more diverse states that render themselves irrelevant by splitting the vote up within their diversity.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/11/politics/cnn-polls-california-texas/index.html