A Reuters/Ipsos poll in January found that two-thirds of Americans were "tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new." Those voters' hopes must have been dashed by the results of Super Tuesday.
Fifteen states and the territory of American Samoa held their primary elections on Tuesday, and the results so far have been unsurprising: The New York Times reports that former President Donald Trump, fresh off a unanimous Supreme Court decision finding that states cannot bar him from their ballots over his attempts to steal the last presidential election, has won nearly every state Republican primary contest.
The results are a sobering rebuke to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Trump's sole remaining challenger for the Republican nomination. Going into Super Tuesday, Haley had lost every single Republican primary with the exception of Washington, D.C. Ahead of the contest in Haley's home state of South Carolina—which she would lose by 20 points—she vowed to continue fighting to the end, and her campaign announced that it would spend over $1 million on ads in Super Tuesday states.
State primaries award candidates a certain number of delegates at the Republican convention in the fall, when the party officially selects its nominee. Before Super Tuesday, Trump had captured 247, with Haley only earning 43; a candidate needs 1,215 delegates to be considered the presumptive nominee.
With more than one-third of all total delegates at stake on Tuesday, Haley needed a miracle—likely multiple miracles, in multiple states—if she wanted to arrest Trump's momentum.
Instead, Trump continued to steamroll his competition, winning primaries in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee by more than 50 points each.
In an address from Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, "there's never been anything so conclusive" as the primary results.
One notable outlier was Vermont, where Haley remained competitive throughout the night before ultimately winning it by nearly 4 points.
I've seen enough: Nikki Haley (R) wins the Vermont GOP primary. And…that's pretty much it.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 6, 2024
In practice, this means that for all its talk of fiscal restraint and moral rectitude, the Republican Party remains in thrall to a candidate who severely hiked spending as president while promising cuts and who currently faces numerous civil and criminal trials for conduct both before and during his presidency.
There was even less drama on the Democratic side, as President Joe Biden easily outperformed his two competitors, wellness guru Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips (D–Minn.). Last week, Williamson "unsuspended" her campaign after she outperformed Phillips in February's Michigan primary, despite having exited the race earlier in the month.
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