President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump won their respective primaries in more than a dozen states on the busiest day of the candidate selection process, Super Tuesday, setting them up for a new showdown.
Early Wednesday it was announced that Nikki Haley, Trump’s last major rival, was leaving the race.
Biden and Trump’s victories in states across the country, including California and Texas, which award large numbers of delegates, left little doubt about the direction of the campaign.
Haley scored a victory in Vermont, preventing a Trump plenary session, but the former president prevailed in other states that could have favored Haley, such as Virginia, Massachusetts and Maine, which have large swaths of moderate voters like those who voted for her. have supported in previous primaries.
The only vote Biden lost was the Democratic caucus in American Samoa, a small territory in the South Pacific. Biden was beaten by an unknown candidate, Jason Palmer, by 51 votes to 40.
Neither Biden nor Trump will be able to become the virtual candidates of their respective parties until enough states vote, which is expected to happen in the middle of this month. But the busiest day of the primaries practically sentenced the rematch between the two for next November. Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, continue to dominate their parties despite questions about their age and neither enjoying widespread popularity among the general electorate.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was full of people who came to a triumphant celebration. Among those in attendance were employees and supporters, such as rapper Forgiato Blow and former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The crowd erupted in jubilation as the Fox News broadcast screens showed that the former president had won the Republican Party primary in North Carolina.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” Trump told an enthusiastic audience. He later lashed out at Biden over management of the U.S.-Mexico border and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. After starting the night with wins in Virginia and North Carolina, he completed the day with wins in Alaska and Utah.
Biden did not offer a speech, but instead issued a statement warning that Tuesday’s results presented Americans with a clear choice and defended his achievements since defeating Trump.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is in jeopardy,” Biden said. “He is motivated by grievances and fraud, focused on his own revenge and retaliation, not the American people.”
Although much of the attention was focused on the presidential candidates, other important consultations were also held. The gubernatorial election took shape in North Carolina, where Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and the current Attorney General, Democrat Josh Stein, will face off in a hotly contested state heading into November.
In California, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff will face Republican Steve Garvey, former Los Angeles Dodgers player, for the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein.
Despite the dominance of Biden and Trump in their parties, the polls made it clear that the electorate in general does not want this year’s elections to be identical to those of 2020. A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that the Most Americans do not believe that Biden or Trump have the mental acuity necessary for the job.
“In my opinion, they both failed to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The days leading up to Super Tuesday showed the unique nature of this campaign. Instead of touring primary states, Biden and Trump held rival rallies over the past week along the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to gain the upper hand in the increasingly tense immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court on Monday voted 9-0 to restore Trump to the primary ballot after attempts to veto him for fueling the insurrection at the Capitol, Trump cited the 91 criminal charges against him to accuse Biden of exploiting the courts.
“Fight your own fight,” Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after his rival.”
Biden is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address on Thursday and will then campaign in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The president has low popularity ratings and polls suggest that many Americans, including a majority of Democrats, do not want the 81-year-old president to run again. His easy victory last week in Michigan was somewhat marred by a campaign for the “uncommitted” vote organized by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Allies of the “uncommitted” movement similarly fueled protest votes in places like Minnesota, which has a sizable Muslim population that includes a Somali-American community. At least 45,000 voters in Minnesota voted “uncommitted,” an option that garnered 19% of the votes counted. That tops Michigan’s 13%.
“Joe Biden hasn’t done enough to earn my vote and he hasn’t done enough to stop the war, stop the slaughter,” said Sarah Alfaham of Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis.
Biden is also the oldest president in the country’s history, and Republicans are highlighting all of his lapses in speech. His advisers insist that skeptical voters will give in when it becomes clear that Trump and Biden will be the options to choose in November.
Trump is now as old as Biden was in the 2020 campaign, and he has increased doubts about his ability with recent mistakes such as wrongly suggesting he was running against Barack Obama, who left the White House in 2017.
“I would love to see the next generation rise and take on leadership positions,” said Democrat Susan Steele, 71, who voted for Biden on Tuesday in Portland, Maine.
Trump has defeated more than a dozen relevant Republican rivals and was now only facing Haley, who was his ambassador to the United Nations. She had maintained strong fundraising and over the weekend she scored her first primary victory in Washington, DC, a city run by Democrats with few registered Republicans. Trump joked that Haley had been “crowned queen of the swamp.”
“We can find something better than two 80-year-old presidential candidates,” Haley said at a rally Monday in suburban Houston.
As dominant as Trump’s victories are, they have shown weaknesses among influential groups of voters, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, where Darthmouth College is located, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as in areas with a high concentration of independents. That includes Minnesota, a state Trump did not win in his otherwise overwhelming 2016 Super Tuesday victory.
Seth De Penning, who described himself as a conservative-leaning independent, voted for Haley on Tuesday in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, because he believes the Republican Party “needs to correct course.” De Penning, 40, said his decision was a vote of conscience and that he has never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and personality.
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