NEW YORK — Joe Biden and Donald Trump hope to capture their respective parties’ presidential nomination with dominant victories in a series of primaries this Tuesday, as the 2024 race for the White House moves into a new phase.
Neither former President Donald Trump nor Biden face opposition in primary contests in Georgia, Washington state, Mississippi and Hawaii. The only question is whether they will obtain the necessary delegates in each state to reach the national threshold of 50% to become their parties’ virtual nominees.
Regardless of whether this happens on Tuesday night or in the following days, the 2024 presidential race is about to begin a crystallizing moment that will finalize a rematch between Biden and Trump in the general election. And that rematch — the first involving two American presidents since 1956 — is almost certain to deepen stark political and cultural divisions in the difficult eight-month period ahead.
On the eve of Tuesday’s vote, Trump acknowledged that Biden would be the Democratic nominee, even though he launched a new attack against the President due to his state of mental health, confirmed today in front of two congressional committees by special prosecutor Robert Hur, who investigated Biden about the secret documents he took from the White House at the end of his role as vice president during Joe Biden’s administration.
“I guess he’s going to be the nominee,” Trump said of Biden on CNBC. “I am his only opponent besides life, life itself.”
Georgia tops the list of four states in which primary elections are held.
That state was an important disputed terrain in the last presidential election in 2020.
Trump faces 91 charges for an unusual and unconstitutional political purge on his way to the White House.
For his part, Biden, 81, is trying to convince that he is physically and mentally capable of leading the most important job in the world, after serious mental errors in recent weeks, all in public. One of them was to confuse and describe the current situation on Mexico’s border with the Gaza Strip, in addition to confusing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador with Egyptian President Abdelfatah El-Sisi.
Days later he called the president of France Enmanuel Macron after the deceased in 1996 Francois Mitterrand.
Trump is 137 delegates short of the 1,215 needed to win the Republican Party nomination. There are 161 Republican delegates up for grabs on Tuesday.
Biden arrives with 102 delegates less than the 1,968 needed to formally become the Democratic candidate. There are 254 Democratic delegates up for grabs Tuesday in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington state.
