CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After all the debates and forums, after the candidate surges, withdrawals and endorsements, voters in large numbers across the country finally had to land on a choice on Tuesday.
But for Democrats who had long hoped for the field to narrow and the options to sharpen, there was still mass uncertainty as people in 14 states from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Coast went to the polls.
Voters picked among five candidates, and many made last-minute decisions — some on the way to the polls — and expressed doubts and anxieties about whether their choice was the right one.
The hesitations reflected the weaknesses of the candidates, who were exposed by 10 debates and four sometimes indecisive state caucuses and primaries, not to mention the prospect that the eventual winner will face the break-all-the-rules style of President Trump, who on Monday night in Charlotte, N.C., mercilessly taunted Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his age and verbal misfires.
“I’m worried about our country, I don’t think we have a perfect candidate this time — we don’t have a Barack Obama,” said Justin Faircloth, a real estate investor and musician in Charlotte. He made up his mind on Tuesday morning to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Doubts lingered. “I’m concerned with Biden, Warren or Sanders, whether they can really make it happen,” he said.
In Massachusetts, less than a mile from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s home, Sibylle Kim said she deeply admired her senator but doubted Ms. Warren’s electability, so she voted for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City.
But even as Ms. Kim entered her polling place in Cambridge, she acknowledged that she wasn’t sure that Mr. Bloomberg was the right choice, either. “I’ve never felt this unconvinced,” she said.
The questions to be answered on a day with nearly a third of delegates at stake were whether Mr. Biden’s comeback was real, whether the Sanders juggernaut would prove unstoppable and whether a new top contender — Mr. Bloomberg or Ms. Warren — might arise.
Mr. Biden’s commanding victory in South Carolina on Saturday and his endorsement by three former presidential candidates on Monday — an effort to bring moderates together and halt Mr. Sanders — swayed some voters.
“I think that changed the trajectory of the race: Biden went from somebody I was skeptical about, you know, his chances, to somebody who I could see winning,” said Matthew Pershe, a graduate student who voted in Arlington, Va.
Mr. Pershe called himself “kind of a Never-Trump Republican” who was looking for a moderate Democrat he could support. He was initially interested in Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, but when both dropped out in recent days and endorsed Mr. Biden, that settled it. “I knew Biden was the one we should probably rally around instead of Bloomberg,” he said.
Virginia and North Carolina, states with many suburbanites and large numbers of black voters, were the places to look for whether Mr. Biden could pull out victories to keep things close with Mr. Sanders, who has enjoyed strong support in the Western states of California and Colorado.
In Colorado, where Mr. Sanders won by 20 percentage points in the 2016 primary elections, Democrats dropping off their ballots at a motor vehicles office in the north Denver suburbs overwhelmingly said they were supporting Mr. Sanders.
Melanie Labonte, 44, a Canadian immigrant who works at an affordable-housing nonprofit, said she was voting in her first primary, and supported Mr. Sanders because she agreed with his condemnations of corporate greed and supported his “Medicare for all” plan. Her husband has multiple sclerosis, and Ms. Labonte said they had run out of his medication some months and had to scramble at the start of each year to arrange his prescriptions.
“This system is very frustrating,” she said.
Some progressives were upset by the groundswell of late-breaking establishment support for Mr. Biden, saying it was a sign that party elites were again trying to deny Mr. Sanders the nomination, after his defeat in 2016 by Hillary Clinton.
“It’s probably going to backfire, just like it did with Hillary,” said Robin Killingsworth, a retired computer-support worker from Adams County, north of Denver, who was voting in his first primary on Tuesday. “The Democratic establishment seems to be screwing us around.”
Mr. Sanders’s strength with Latinos was expected to be a major factor in the Super Tuesday states of California, Texas and Colorado. At another voting site in Adams County, which is about 40 percent Hispanic, José and Mayela Garcia Alba pulled up in their rattling bronze sedan to vote for Mr. Sanders. The couple run a small housecleaning business and obtain their health coverage through Medicaid, and said they did not know when — or if — they would be able to afford to retire. They liked Mr. Sanders’s proposals to expand public health care and cut high prescription costs.
“The conditions now are primed for a person like Bernie,” said Mr. Garcia Alba, 62.
Texas has the second-largest number of delegates to award on Tuesday, after California, and Mr. Biden was hoping to keep it close there, especially after winning the endorsement on Monday of former Representative Beto O’Rourke, who ran a brief presidential campaign and nearly won a Senate seat in Texas in 2018. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton defeated Mr. Sanders in the state among not only white and black voters but also Latinos.
In Kashmere Gardens, a historic but struggling black neighborhood in Houston, Victor R. Denson, 55, voted for Mr. Biden.
“I remember how he did with Obama,” Mr. Denson, an Army veteran who is a student at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, said of the former vice president. “I voted for Obama, and I think he would lead us the same way, and take us away from what Trump is doing. And I didn’t want Bernie because Bernie, I feel like he’s a socialist. And Elizabeth Warren, I don’t think that America is ready for a lady president right now. I’m just going to ride with Joe.”
As in every Super Tuesday state, the great unknown was Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire who is on the ballot for the first time and has saturated airwaves, the internet and countless highway crossroads with his ads. On one median in Charlotte, Bloomberg campaign workers had seemingly decided to plant all their surplus signs: Scores dotted a few dozen yards.
There was some evidence that the former mayor’s vast spending had made an impact. Al Rogers, a retired cable splicer for phone companies in Charlotte, voted for Mr. Bloomberg. He said his TV spots were as seductive as those for a 2020 Cadillac. “I hate to say it, but a political ad is almost like an ad for a new car: It’s going to do this and it’s going to do that,” he said.
In other words, sold.
Reporting was contributed by Jack Healy from Denver, Farah Stockman from Cambridge, Mass., Michael Wines from Arlington, Va., and Manny Fernandez from Houston.