Hillary builds a Super Tuesday firewall: (HILLARY GROUP)

CLEVELAND — Bernie Sanders is soaring in the polls. Joe Biden is making increasingly loud noises about joining the race. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers are working methodically to build the fail-safe they think can secure the nomination, and it’s pegged to a single day on the calendar:

March 1, 2016. Super Tuesday. That’s when, according to their plans, Clinton’s financial advantage, combined with early planning and strategizing, can deliver the knockout punch.

Some of this is the product of a compulsion to avoid the mistakes made in 2008 that allowed Barack Obama to swoop in. Indeed, her aides began planning for Super Tuesday before the campaign even launched, back when her inner circle was more worried about Martin O’Malley than Sanders.

But uncertainty in Brooklyn about how Clinton will fare in the early-voting states increases the urgency of organizing in the March states.

Eleven states will vote on March 1, including delegate-heavy Texas, Virginia and Colorado. And while her aides say that Clinton can and will compete vigorously in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, her fate will depend on dispatching challengers in March — something she critically failed to do last time around.

If it works, the former secretary of state will have wrapped up the party’s nomination before spring ends — with only 32 states and two territories having voted — thereby avoiding the kind of protracted battle that consumed much of 2008.

Already, the focus is shifting to those later states. While Clinton still visits the February states regularly — she was in Iowa on Wednesday — in recent weeks her campaign and fundraising stops in the March states have skyrocketed in frequency, while her team sends in surrogates for public events and staffers for behind-the-scenes meetings with local influencers.

Legions of elected officials who’ve backed Clinton have been headlining regular organizing meetings — like when Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin and one of his predecessors in the governor’s mansion, Madeleine Kunin, held an in-state event for Clinton less than a week after Sanders kicked off his own campaign, blocks away from his launch site....

Politico: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/hillary-clinton-2016-super-tuesday-firewall-121781.html#ixzz3k2K2cAmB