The biggest day of this year’s primary campaign approaches as 16 states vote in contests known as Super Tuesday.

The election is a pivotal moment for Presidents Biden and Donald Trump, who are the overwhelming frontrunners for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, respectively. Since it was the day when the most delegates were at stake, strong performances from Biden and Trump would bring them much closer to their party’s nominee.

The competition will take place from Alaska and California to Virginia and Vermont. And while most of the attention will be on the presidential election, there are other important elections on Tuesday.

Some things to look at:

Will Trump keep rolling?

So far, the Republican presidential primary has been a slacker.

The former president has dominated the race and his last major rival in the race, his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, is struggling to keep up. She lost the Feb. 27 primary in Michigan by more than 40 percentage points. She even lost her home state of South Carolina, where she was twice elected governor, by more than 20 percentage points.

As the race plays out toward Super Tuesday, the massive map appears tailor-made for Trump to gain an insurmountable lead over Haley. His team has increased the pressure on Haley to drop out, and another big win could be a major point in their favor.

Haley has raised a significant amount of campaign cash and says she wants to stay in the race until the Republican National Convention in July, in case delegates there have second thoughts about Trump’s formal nomination amid his legal troubles. But she recently saw some of her financial support wavered when the organization Americans For Prosperity, backed by billionaire co-founder Charles Koch, announced it would stop spending on her behalf after South Carolina.

She may not be able to afford another big loss.

Will college students continue to turn against Trump?

Among Trump’s impressive victories this primary season, there was a notable warning sign for November: He performed poorly in the higher-stakes primaries.

In the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, APVoteCast found that graduates chose Haley over Trump. About two-thirds of voters in both states who attended graduate school after college voted for the former governor of South Carolina.

In South Carolina, Trump won the suburbs, but not to the same extent as his dominance in small towns and rural areas, effectively splitting the vote against Haley.

One of the biggest questions on Tuesday is whether Trump can repair that rift. Weakness among graduates and in the suburbs where they cluster

was an important reason for that

Trump

lost to Biden in 2020. Will Biden end the doubts?

As sleepy as the Republican presidential primary has been, the Democratic one has been even quieter. Biden has many political problems that are dragging him down in the public opinion polls, but not in the primary polls so far.

The only speed bump came in Michigan, where an organized effort to introduce uncommitted voting in the primaries there to protest Biden’s support for Israel during the Gaza war garnered 13% of the vote, a slightly higher share than that option in the last primaries under a Democratic president seeking re-election, Barack Obama in 2012.

The only similarly organized anti-Biden effort on the Super Tuesday calendar is one put together at the last minute by a handful of left-wing groups in Colorado for no-strings-attached voting on Thursday, similar to the campaign in Michigan. About 700,000 Coloradans had already cast ballots in the all-mail primary.

The other obstacles are the president’s two long-awaited primary opponents, who still have low numbers against him, U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who revived her suspended campaign after receiving a surprising 3%. of the Michigan primaries

.Another GOP test in Texas

Texas Atty. General Ken Paxton survived an impeachment led by his own party last year. Now he wants revenge, and Trump is helping him.

The impeachment stemmed from Paxton’s legal troubles. He faces a trial in April on security fraud charges, and an additional federal corruption probe over allegations that he used his office to benefit a campaign donor who fueled the impeachment charges.

Paxton is targeting more than 30 Republican lawmakers in the primaries, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives

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Phelan. Paxton is also seeking to unseat three Republican judges on the state’s conservative appeals court who voted to limit the attorney general’s powers.

Paxton has been a staunch supporter of Trump, including the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, and Trump is helping Paxton in his primary campaign. The purge in Texas will be a test of what Republican voters value most in their elected officials.

Can North Carolina candidates unite the parties?

Most of the country chose its governors in the 2022 off-year elections, but North Carolina is gearing up for an intense race this fall. The frontrunners of the major parties for the seat are being vacated by the term-limited Democratic Government. Roy Cooper will have to demonstrate that he can unite his parties in the primaries.

Atty. General Josh Stein has Cooper’s approval. Stein’s main competitor is Mike Morgan, a former Supreme Court associate.

The Republican frontrunner is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has become divisive for his vocal criticism of the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues in sex education and for his comments at a church that Christians are called to be led by men. His opponents, state Treasurer Dale Folwell and attorney Bill Graham, say Robinson is too polarizing to win in November.

Robinson won Trump’s endorsement last year, but it’s worth seeing whether he shows the same weaknesses as the former president among college-educated suburban voters. Biden’s reelection campaign is focusing on North Carolina because it thinks those voters can help him beat Trump there.