Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a Super Tuesday election night party. Photo / AP
US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump romped through more than a dozen states on Super Tuesday, all but cementing a November rematch and increasing pressure on the former president’s last major rival, Nikki Haley, to leave the race.
Their victories from coast to coast, including the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, left little doubt about the trajectory of the race.
Haley won Vermont, denying Trump a full sweep, but the former president carried other states that might have been favourable to her such as Virginia, Massachusetts and Maine, which have large swaths of moderate voters like those who have backed her in previous primaries.
The only contest Biden lost was the Democratic caucus in American Samoa, a tiny US territory in the South Pacific Ocean.
Biden was defeated by previously unknown candidate Jason Palmer, 51 votes to 40.
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump or Biden to formally become their parties’ presumptive nominees. But the primary’s biggest day made their rematch a near-certainty.
Both the 81-year-old Biden and the 77-year-old Trump continue to dominate their parties despite facing questions about age and neither having broad popularity across the general electorate.
Haley watched the election results in private and had no campaign events scheduled going forward. Her campaign said in a statement that the results reflected there were many Republicans “who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump”.
”Unity is not achieved by simply claiming ‘we’re united,”’ spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, meanwhile, was packed for a victory party. Among those attending were staff and supporters, including the rapper Forgiato Blow and former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The crowd erupted as Fox News, playing on screens around the ballroom, announced that the former president had won North Carolina’s GOP primary.
”They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” Trump told a raucous crowd. He went on to attack Biden over the US-Mexico border and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden didn’t give a speech but instead issued a statement warning that today’s results had left Americans with a clear choice and touting his own accomplishments after beating Trump.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is at risk,” Biden said.
“He is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people.
”While much of the focus was on the presidential race, there were also important down-ballot contests. The governor’s race took shape in North Carolina, where Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face off in a state that both parties are fiercely contesting ahead of November.
In California, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, a former Los Angeles Dodgers baseball player, advanced to the general election race to fill the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein.
Despite Biden’s and Trump’s domination of their parties, polls make it clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds a majority of Americans don’t think either Biden or Trump has the necessary mental acuity for the job.
”Both of them failed, in my opinion, to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The final days before Super Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Rather than barnstorming the states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events last week along the US-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to restore Trump to primary ballots following attempts to ban him for his role in helping spark the Capitol riot, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal counts against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.
“Fight your fight yourself,” Trump said.
“Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.” Biden delivers the State of the Union address Thursday, then will campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The president faces low approval ratings and polls suggesting that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old running again.
His easy Michigan primary win last week was spoiled slightly by an “uncommitted” campaign organized by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Allies of the “uncommitted” movement pushed similar protest votes elsewhere, such as in Minnesota, which has a significant population of Muslims, including in its Somali American community.
At least 45,000 voters in Minnesota selected “uncommitted,” which won 19% with almost all votes counted. That exceeds the 13 per cent of voters who selected “uncommitted” in Michigan.
”Joe Biden has not done enough to earn my vote and not done enough to stop the war, stop the massacre,” said Sarah Alfaham of the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington.
Biden also is the oldest president ever and Republicans key on any verbal slip he makes. His aides insist that skeptical voters will come around once it is clear that either Trump or Biden will be elected again in November. Trump is now the same age Biden was during the 2020 campaign, and he has exacerbated questions about his own fitness with recent flubs, such as mistakenly suggesting he was running against Barack Obama, who left the White House in 2017.
“I would love to see the next generation move up and take leadership roles,” said Democrat Susan Steele, 71, who voted for Biden in Portland, Maine.
Trump has already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now faces only Haley, his former UN ambassador. She had maintained strong fundraising and notched her first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, DC, a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans.
Trump scoffed that Haley had been “crowned queen of the swamp”.
“We can do better than two 80-year-old candidates for president,” Haley said at a rally Monday in the Houston suburbs.
Trump’s victories, however dominating, have shown vulnerabilities with influential voter blocs, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as areas with high concentrations of independents. That includes Minnesota, a state Trump did not carry in his otherwise overwhelming Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for Haley, he said, because the GOP “needs a course correction.”
De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he has never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
The picture of the presidential race has hardly been cloudy for some time, even if it is one that most voters say they don’t want to see. On not-so-Super Tuesday, there were few surprises.
It became ever clearer Biden was on a glidepath to the Democratic nomination that only some kind of personal catastrophe could alter. And his predecessor, Donald Trump — if he can navigate the 91 criminal charges against him and avoid any other calamity — is headed to a third Republican nomination, and a rematch against the president.
Enthusiasm for Biden was not the story of the day, with some Democrats even voting “uncommitted” rather than for the incumbent. For Trump, there were cautionary signs even with his string of victories.
Haley won her first state of the primary season, Vermont, but that was no cause to talk about momentum.
She continued her long streak of losing big to Trump in Republican primaries in every region of the country.
Her lone other victory had come in last week’s Washington, DC, primary.
Tuesday’s defeats continued to erode the rationale for her insurgent challenge. She fell short even in states like Virginia, where the electorate, rich in college-educated suburban voters, played to her strength.
That doesn’t mean her campaign has not been impactful. She has repeatedly said that Trump cannot win a general election, in large part because he will have trouble winning over the kind of Republicans who supported her. In a close election, even a small move of voters away from Trump could flip a state and alter the outcome.
She also delivered the kind of stark personal attacks on Trump that could show up in Democratic ads against him in the fall, slamming him for an $83 million judgment against him for defaming a woman who sued him for sexual assault, and warning that he could transform the Republican National Committee into his own “legal slush fund.”
Vermont was once a stronghold of old-guard Republicanism, exclusively electing GOP candidates to statewide office for more than a century. But the state that handed Haley her only win on Super Tuesday long ago ceded that reputation.
Now Vermont, which last swung for a Republican in a presidential contest in 1988, is perhaps better known for progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, the jam band Phish and a crunchy strain of back-to-earth lifestyle. So, while Vermont handed Haley her first statewide victory, the state itself is decidedly not in step with Trump and the modern Republican Party.
What has been obvious for weeks, is now beyond reasonable dispute: Biden and Trump are the overwhelming favourites to face each other in November.
They could not be more different in outlook but they seemed to be mirror images of each other during the primary season.
Trump wanted a coronation, but Haley made him fight at least somewhat to win the nomination. She’s held onto a stubborn chunk of voters, a possible indication that part of the GOP isn’t as enthusiastic about Trump as expected.
Biden, on the other hand, faces a lack of Democratic enthusiasm on paper, but not in the primary. Polls show problems for him among some of his party’s core demographics, including younger and Black voters. But Biden, who hasn’t faced any significant challengers, has won his primaries by huge margins.
The only possible sign of trouble for him Tuesday was an unusually high number of Democrats voting “uncommitted” in Minnesota in protest of the president’s handling of the war in Gaza.
It may be that one or both of these two politicians is more hobbled than it appears — but nonetheless, they are the only options.
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