Various Networks, 7:00 p.m. ET
Today’s Super Tuesday voting is an important, unusually unpredictable affair, thanks to several Democratic candidates dropping out and endorsing Joe Biden, whose decisive win in South Carolina revived his prospects as his party’s more centrist choice. Bernie Sanders still is expected to emerge victoriously from the 14 states voting today (along with Americans abroad and those in American Samoa) – but the question now is the margin of victory, and whether remaining rivals Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren, not to mention Biden, can meet the 15 percent threshold required to be awarded delegates in each state. If not, the night could be a slam dunk for Sanders. If so, the more who reach the 15 percent mark, the better it is for Biden. And nobody really knows the full effects of Biden’s recent victory, and the even more recent endorsements from several dropped-from-the-race politicians – so tonight’s coverage should be roller coaster. The first polls close at 7 p.m. ET, in Vermont and Virginia, and keep trickling out until the biggest prize, California, closes its polls at 11 p.m. ET. Watch wherever you like to get your news – but, at some point, sample Steve Kornacki’s “Big board” coverage and analysis over at MSNBC. Not only is he really good at isolating the key factors in each race and region, but he flat-out enjoys politics and TV coverage, it seems, more than anyone since NBC’s Tim Russert.
TCM, 10:00 p.m. ET
Director Robert Drew’s documentary was released in October 1963, only four months after the events captured in the film, and only a month before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Crisis is a study, with remarkable access to the Oval Office and elsewhere, of Kennedy’s treatment of a pivotal civil rights confrontation that same year. Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a strict segregationist, had vowed to stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama, and refuse entry to two black students who had been admitted as part of the recent federal push for desegregation. Kennedy and his younger brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, are shown trying to avert, then handle, the crisis as it unfolded. Somehow, on Super Tuesday in 2020 – just a few days after a majority African-American population in another southern state may have voted to change the course of history – Crisis has even more power. And, perhaps, even more relevance.
