5 takeaways from Super Tuesday
Donald J. Trump scored victories across the country on Super Tuesday, and by the end of the evening it was clear that the former president had left Nikki Haley in the dust of the delegates.
Trump’s victories from coast to coast — in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and beyond — brought a new mathematical certainty to what has been the political reality for some time: Trump is barreling toward the Republican Party’s presidential primary. lecture.
But within Trump’s often dominant statewide victories, there were still signs of vulnerability. He showed some of the same weakness in the swinging suburbs that cost him the White House in 2020.
The presidential primaries, along with a series of congressional contests in key districts, many of which were still undecided, provided the broadest look yet at the preferences of voters in both parties heading into the 2024 elections. Here are five lessons from the results :
An unstoppable Mr Trump continues to roll.
About a third of the population voted on Tuesday, but there was little drama. News outlets called state after state shortly after the polls closed, just as they have done since Mr. Trump topped the 50 percent mark to kick off the Iowa caucuses.
The exception was Vermont, where Ms. Haley scored her first state victory (she won Washington, D.C., this weekend). But that was a small island in a sea of Trump landslides in more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, where he was above 80 percent.
There was so little for Ms. Haley to turn around on Tuesday that she skipped any public comments at all, watching the returns behind closed doors in Charleston, S.C. message as much as the gathering of delegates.
Even with Ms. Haley still in the race, Trump has largely campaigned in the primaries, which also happen to be November’s battleground. For example, he went to North Carolina last weekend ahead of Super Tuesday, and will go to Georgia next weekend ahead of the March 12 primaries.
On Tuesday, Trump held a party at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. (He has spent about $315,000 in campaign funds at Mar-a-Lago since announcing his 2024 run, records show.)
“It was a big night,” he declared.
The bigger night for Trump — actually securing the delegates needed to secure his nomination — could arrive as soon as March 12 or 19.
There are warning signs for Trump in the Haley vote.
Right now, the Biden team is studying Ms. Haley’s suburban appearances almost as closely as the Trump operation, if not more so.
The main battleground for voting on Tuesday was North Carolina, a state that Trump only narrowly won in 2020. And while Trump won the primaries there with about 75 percent of the vote, he was weakest in the counties surrounding and surrounding him. Raleigh and Charlotte are ahead by single digits in Mecklenburg County.
Exit polls told a different part of the story.
A majority of Ms. Haley’s primary voters said yes vote against her opponent more so than for her, a sign of anti-Trump motivation that could last into November. And even in defeat she led moderate voters by almost two to one. Her problem was that moderates make up only 20 percent of voters in a Republican primary. But in a close general election, those voters may matter more.
Overall, approximately one in four Republican primary voters in North Carolina said they would be displeased if Trump won the nomination.
“In state after state, there continues to be a large bloc of Republican primary voters expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump,” said Haley campaign spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas.
The education gap within the Republican Party was especially large. Trump narrowly carried Republican primary voters with college degrees in North Carolina, 51 percent to 45 percent, but he crushed Ms. Haley, 80 percent to 15 percent, among Republican voters without college degrees.
In other words, Mr. Trump’s base gets him the nomination. But he may need to bring other voters into his coalition to win in the fall.
The Democrats have bruised Biden – again.
Mr. Biden, who has faced only nominal opposition for the Democratic nomination, also won by wide margins across the country: Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia, to name a few. By the end of the night he had visited all fifteen states.
But once again there were flashing lights for a president who is struggling to get the entire party behind him. With results still coming in, nearly 20 percent of Minnesota Democrats voted uncommitted, in an apparent protest vote against Mr. Biden’s support for Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. Mr Biden won only two-thirds of the votes. the vote in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis.
The protest was an extension of a campaign that began last week in Michigan, when 13 percent of Democrats voted uncommitted. The higher share in a state with fewer Arab-American voters — but a large and active progressive wing — suggested that the movement of voters urging Biden to make a policy change was gaining strength.
There were other signs too. In Colorado, the number of uncommitted votes stood at 7 percent, with votes still being counted. There was also a significant “no preference” vote in North Carolina; it’s worth noting as Mr. Biden considers contesting a state that Mr. Trump won by a hair in 2020.
It is far from clear what these voters will do in November. But if they supported Trump, backed a third-party candidate or simply stayed home, they could cost Biden a close election.
Minnesota wasn’t the only state to cast a bit of gloom on Mr. Biden’s night. In a minor outrage for the sitting president, Mr. Biden tied the delegation race in American Samoa to Jason Palmer, an entrepreneur. (It’s okay if you haven’t heard of him before tonight.) There are no votes in the Electoral College in American Samoa.
A Trump speech previews dark themes for the fall.
When Trump won in Iowa in January, he pulled aides onto the stage for an impromptu celebration. He did the same in the next game, inviting supporters to join him in New Hampshire. And then again in South Carolina.
But on Super Tuesday, Trump took the stage solo. He then never mentioned Mrs. Haley’s name.
The images and messages were unmistakable: Mr. Trump is now focused on Mr. Biden, pursuing a cause that America has eclipsed since he left office, with a particular emphasis on immigration, inflation and international affairs.
“Frankly, our country is dying,” Trump said.
He spoke in typical hyperbole, but tapped into real sentiment. The recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that 65 percent of registered voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction — including 42 percent of Democrats.
A week after Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden both traveled to the border, the former president returned again and again to the issue that now animates much of his stump speech.
He also tried to make his position clear on his handling of Covid (“We never got credit for that”), the stock market (“That’s doing well because our poll numbers are so much higher than Joe Biden’s”) and how the nation worldwide position. had plummeted since his departure (“The world is laughing at us”).
California’s top-two primary system was an early loser.
There were two winners in Tuesday night’s California Senate primary: Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, and Steve Garvey, the former Los Angeles Dodger and a Republican.
But there was probably also one clear loser: the top two, nonpartisan primary system that California voters adopted in 2010. The system was sold as a good government reform, designed to eliminate partisanship and promote centrist politicians. Instead, it showed itself – once again – as vulnerable as traditional primaries to partisan political play.
Mr. Schiff, one of two leading Democrats in the race for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat, and his allies spent millions of dollars to boost Mr. Garvey.
Mr. Garvey, who barely campaigned, has little chance of becoming the next senator from predominantly Democratic California. But Mr. Schiff wanted to face a Republican in the runoff instead of Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat with significant support among progressives.
Supporters of Ms. Porter also tried to game the system, though not as aggressively as Mr. Schiff, by boosting the prospects of another Republican on the ballot, Eric Early, to wrest Republican support from Mr. Garvey.
One unintended result: Republican voters, who have been increasingly marginalized in statewide races as California has become increasingly Democratic, have ended up getting at least a little say in choosing the state’s next senator.