Texas is crucial to Biden’s effort to make the Democratic primary a one-on-one contest against frontrunner Bernie Sanders, who’s expected to win the biggest state of all on Super Tuesday, California.

“I expect to win Texas,” boasted Cristobal Alex, a senior adviser to Biden and native of El Paso, Texas. “The polls don’t account for results in South Carolina, which are game-changing. ...This is more than anything a numbers game and it’s about math.”

Sanders made a swing through the Lone Star State after dominating in Nevada Feb. 20 -- right as early voting started, making prognosticators in the state predict those numbers will favor Sanders.

However, three-quarters of the electorate that cast early ballots are over the age of 40 according to Ryan Data & Research, a Texas political analytics firm that tracks early votes. That could be an advantage for Biden, who generally polls well with middle-aged and older voters.

It’s hard to avoid thinking of Bloomberg’s bid as a kind of political science experiment — a test of whether an elderly, extraordinarily wealthy ex-Republican can run a competitive campaign almost entirely on the basis of his own advertising and a big, generously paid staff. That experiment will play out across the country this week, when Bloomberg will finally appear on the ballot after a bizarre campaign in which he entered the race late, skipped the four early states and focused instead on winning the trove of delegates that await on Super Tuesday.

And California is, in many ways, the maximal test of Bloomberg’s strategy. He’s invested a lot in other big Super Tuesday states like Texas, but California is the state where his dollars should carry him the furthest, because its media markets are so expensive and the state’s large, diverse population makes it hard to set up an effective ground game.

His spending spree has certainly gotten him somewhere in California. Bloomberg is now polling around 13 percent in California, according to our average, up from 4 percent in January. But Californians also love to tell you about the self-funded candidates who have tried — and failed — to spend their way into public office. Take Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Michael Huffington or Al Checchi. After this Tuesday, we’ll know whether Bloomberg will join that inglorious pantheon or whether California’s unexpected contribution to the Democratic nomination process is the elevation of a self-funded billionaire’s candidacy.

Right now, it seems like Bloomberg will finish in third or fourth place even though he has spent tens of millions of dollars in the state. But after seeing Bloomberg’s swanky office, I wanted to find out how ordinary Californians were feeling about his campaign. After spending several days talking to voters across Los Angeles, one thing became clear: Bloomberg’s spending has bought him notoriety, but hasn’t translated into widespread enthusiasm.

Bernie Sanders still has a large lead in the California primary, but after the South Carolina primary it has shrunk significantly due to a 7-point bump for Joe Biden since Point Blank Political’s last survey. Sanders’ 33.9-percent vote-share is largely unchanged since PBP’s pre-South Carolina poll, but Biden’s support has increased from 14 percent to 21.6 percent after his victory in South Carolina. This is the third California poll Point Blank Political has conducted in the last week; over the last week Joe Biden has seen a 10-point increase following the debates and South Carolina. All other candidates’ support was largely unchanged, except for Pete Buttigieg who’s support dropped 3 percent in the waning hours of his now suspended campaign. The data was collected during the 24-hour period from the evening of February 29th, just as Biden declared victory in South Carolina, to the evening of March 1st, just as Buttigieg was suspending his campaign. The sample size was 1220 and the margin of error is 4.1 percent (95-percent confidence interval).

The results were weighted by gender, race, age, and education using a Random Iterative Model. The model’s weighting efficiency was 45 percent. The weighting efficiency was primarily driven downward by the raw sample being tilted towards those with a higher education, and slightly tilted towards white voters. RIM models correct for this by appropriately weighting groups that are under or overrepresented in the sample. Population estimates for the demographics were obtained through a combination of third-party provided voter-file data and exit polls.