Biden and Trump head into Super Tuesday toward a likely rematch in November, despite voter concerns
Homepage News, Elections 2024
WILL WEISSERT and BILL BARROWMarch 5, 2024
President Biden and former President Trump are poised to move much closer to winning their parties’ nominations on Tuesday on the biggest day of the primaries, despite many voters favoring something other than a November rematch from four years ago.
Super Tuesday elections are being held in 16 states and one territory, from Alaska and California to Vermont and Virginia. Hundreds of delegates are at stake, the largest return for either side in a single day.
While most attention is focused on the presidential race, there are also important voting rounds. California voters will choose candidates who will compete for the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein. The gubernatorial race will take shape in North Carolina, a state that is hotly contested by both parties heading into November. And in Los Angeles, a progressive prosecutor is trying to fend off an intense reelection challenge in a contest that could serve as a barometer of crime politics.
However, the spotlight remains on 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump, who continue to dominate their parties despite both facing questions about their ages and neither enjoying widespread popularity among the general electorate.
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His party’s presumptive nominee will be March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden. But in a departure from most previous Super Tuesdays, both nominations have effectively been settled, with Biden and Trump both looking ahead to a repeat of the 2020 general election.
We have to beat Biden, he is the worst president in history, Trump said on the morning show ‘Fox & Friends’ on Tuesday.
Biden responded with a pair of radio interviews to shore up his support among Black voters, who helped anchor his 2020 coalition.
If we lose this election, you’ll be back to Donald Trump, Biden said on DeDe in the Morning, hosted by DeDe McGuire. The way he talks about the African-American community, the way he acted, the way he treated the African-American community, I think has been shameful.
Despite Biden and Trump’s dominance of their parties, polls make clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that a majority of Americans do not think Biden or Trump have the necessary mental acuity for the job.
Both, in my opinion, have failed to unite this country, said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, NC.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the uniqueness of this year’s campaign. Instead of storming states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events along the U.S.-Mexico border last week, each trying to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to return Trump to the primary ballot following efforts to ban him for his role in helping to spark the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal charges against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.
Fight your own battle, Trump said. Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.
Biden will deliver the State of the Union address on Thursday and will then campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia. The president will defend policies responsible for “record job creation, the strongest economy in the world, higher wages and household prosperity, and lower drug and energy costs,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in a statement. to Trump’s priorities, which he described as rewarding billionaires and corporations with tax breaks, taking away rights and freedoms, and undermining our democracy.
Biden’s campaign drew attention to Trump’s most provocative statements that evoked Adolf Hitler by declaring that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the US and lightheartedly suggesting that he would act as dictator on his first day back in the White House.
Trump recently told a gala for black conservatives that he believed African Americans empathized with his four criminal charges. That drew renewed rebuke from Democrats across the country for comparing the personal legal battles to the historic injustices Black people have faced in the US.
The former president has already defeated more than a dozen major Republican challengers and is now down to just one: Nikki Haley, the former president’s former U.N. ambassador who was also twice elected governor of her home state of South Carolina.
Haley has hopped around the country, visiting at least one Super Tuesday state almost every day for more than a week, suggesting Trump cannot beat Biden. We can do better than two octogenarian candidates for president, Haley said Monday at a rally in suburban Houston.
Haley has maintained strong fundraising and won her first primary victory this weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democratic-led city with few registered Republicans. Trump mocked the fact that Haley had been crowned Queen of the Swamp.
Trump’s victories have nevertheless shown vulnerabilities with influential blocs of voters, especially in college towns like Hanover, NH, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan, as well as in areas with high concentrations of independents. That includes Minnesota, a state Trump didn’t showcase during his otherwise stunning Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted for Haley on Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, he said, because the Republican Party needs a course correction. De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
Still, winning a Super Tuesday contest would be an upset for Haley, and a Trump win would only increase the pressure on her to quit the race.
Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls indicating that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old run again. The president’s easy victory in Michigan last week was somewhat spoiled by a non-committal campaign organized by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Organizers of the uncommitted vote are pushing similar protest votes elsewhere, including Minnesota. The state has a significant population of Muslims, including in the Somali-American community. Gov. Tim Walz, a Biden ally, told the Associated Press last week that he expected some open-ballot votes on Tuesday.
Biden is the oldest president ever and Republicans are capitalizing on every verbal mistake he makes. His aides insist that skeptical voters will turn out once it is clear that Trump or Biden will be re-elected in November. Trump is now the same age as Biden was during the 2020 campaign, and he has exacerbated questions about his own fitness with recent blunders, such as falsely suggesting he was running against Barack Obama, who left the White House in 2017.
I would like to see the next generation grow up and take on leadership roles, said Democrat Susan Steele, 71, who voted for Biden on Tuesday in Portland, Maine. Mary Veroneau, a 69-year-old Democrat from Maine, also voted for Biden, but said you would honestly want a younger candidate than the president or the former president. Such concerns have not moved fervent Trump supporters. Trump would eat him, Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a weekend Trump rally in Virginia, adding that Biden would look like a fool up there. Weissert and Barrow write for the Associated Press. Weissert reported from Washington and Barrow from Atlanta. Associated Press writers David Sharp in Portland, Maine; Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, NC; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia; Trisha Ahmed in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.
Fernando Dowling is an author and political journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He has a deep understanding of the political landscape and a passion for analyzing the latest political trends and news.