Super Tuesday takeaways: Biden and Trump’s momentum can’t be slowed
Election 2024
NICHOLAS RICCARDI and BRIAN SLODYSKOMarch 6, 2024
The picture of the presidential race has hardly been bleak for a while, even if it is one that most voters say they don’t want to see.
There were few surprises on the not-so-Super Tuesday. It became increasingly clear, Chairman
Joe
Biden was on his way to the Democratic nomination that only a personal catastrophe could change.
His predecessor in the White House, Donald Trump, is headed for a third Republican nomination and a rematch against Biden if Trump can get through the 91 criminal charges against him and avoid other disasters. Trump’s last major challenger from the Republican Party, Nikki Haley, suspended her campaign on Wednesday after suffering a sound defeat across the country on Super Tuesday.
Enthusiasm for Biden was not the story of Tuesday’s primaries, with some Democrats even voting casually instead of for the incumbent president. For Trump, even despite his string of victories, there were warning signs.
Some key insights from Super Tuesday:
HALEY STANDS TO THE SIDEHaley steps aside
Haley won her first state of the primary season, Vermont, but that was no reason to talk about momentum. The former U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina continued her long streak of big losses to Trump in Republican primaries in every region of the country. Her
alone lonely
another victory had been won in recent weeks, mainly in the District of Columbia.
Even in states she fell short
like like
Virginia, where the electorate, rich in college-educated suburban voters, played to its strength. Soon came the announcement about the suspension of her campaign.
That doesn’t mean her candidacy had no impact. She repeatedly said Trump cannot win a general election, largely because he will have difficulty winning over the kind of Republicans who supported her. In a close election, even a small movement of voters away from Trump could flip a state and change the outcome. Haley did not endorse Trump during her remarks Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina. She challenged him to win the support of the moderate Republicans and independent voters who supported her. During her campaign, Haley made the kind of strong personal attacks on Trump that could appear in Democratic ads against him in the fall. She handed him an $83 million judgment for defaming a woman who sued him for sexual assault and warned he could turn the Republican National Committee into his own legal slush fund. AS GOES VERMONT, SO GOES VERMONTAs Vermont goes, so goes Vermont
Vermont was once a stronghold of old-guard Republicanism, where exclusively GOP candidates were elected to statewide offices for more than a century. But the state that gave Haley her only victory on Super Tuesday has long since abandoned that reputation.
Now Vermont, which last played for a Republican in a presidential contest in 1988, is perhaps better known for progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, the jam band Phish and a crunchy brand of music.
back to earth, back to the land
lifestyle.
So while Vermont gave Haley her first statewide victory, the state itself is decidedly out of step with Trump and the modern Republican Party.
THE BIDEN-TRUMP MIRROR PRIMARYThe Biden-Trump mirror primary
What has been clear for weeks is now beyond all reasonable doubt: Biden and Trump are the overwhelming favorites to meet in November.
They couldn’t be more different from each other
,
but during preseason they seemed to be mirror images of each other.
Trump wanted a coronation, but Haley made him at least fight somewhat to get the nomination. She retained a stubborn share of voters, a possible indication that part of the Republican Party is not as enthusiastic about Trump as expected.
Biden, on the other hand, faces a lack of Democratic enthusiasm on paper, but not in the primaries. Polls show he faces challenges among some of his party’s key demographics, including younger and black voters. But Biden, who has faced no major challengers, won his primaries by large margins.
The only possible sign of trouble for him Tuesday was an unusually high number of Democrats voting uncommitted in Minnesota to protest the president’s handling of
it was in Gaza. Israel-Hamas was.
It may be that one or both of these two politicians is more bothered than it seems, but still, these are the only options.
HOUSE RACES, PRIMARY PRIMACITYHouse races, primary primacy
Super Tuesday is so big that there were primaries for more than a quarter of all seats in the House of Representatives (115 of 438). But only eight of those seats are likely to be competitive in November.
That astonishing statistic comes from Michael Li, a redistricting expert at Brennan
Institute Center
for justice in New York. That means most House candidates who won Tuesday’s primaries are guaranteed seats in Congress just because they secured the votes of their party’s most motivated members.
That is one of the biggest causes of polarization in the United States. The number of competitive seats in the House of Representatives has been steadily declining for decades. It reflects both partisan gerrymandering and citizens dividing themselves into increasingly partisan enclaves.
Texas is an example of the role of gerrymandering. 2018 and 2020 saw several competitive House races as Democrats began gaining ground in the long-red state. So the Republicans who controlled the statehouse simply pushed the boundaries to protect Republicans, lumping together large groups of Democrats. That meant Democrats had safe seats, but fewer than they normally would have, because they couldn’t threaten any Republican incumbents.
Regardless of the cause, this means that much of the battle for the House of Representatives effectively ended Tuesday night.
NC GOVERNOR’S RACE CAN ECHO BIDEN V. TRUMPThe NC governor’s race could be an echo of Biden vs. Trump
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson easily won the state’s Republican primary. His inflammatory rhetoric, calling Hillary Clinton a heifer and Michelle Obama a man, is setting up a hotly contested general election in the crucial swing state that could spill over into the presidential race.
Robinson had no prior experience in public office before his 2020 election and it shows.
He denounced the 2018 action hero film Black Panther as a satanic Marxist production made by a secular Jew, using a Yiddish slur for
b
lack of people. He faced calls to resign in 2021 after trashing gay and transgender people.
His brash style won praise from Trump, who on Sunday called Robinson better than Martin Luther King while voicing his full support.
But it will also likely motivate state Democrats to support Att. in November
orne
j
.
gene
. eral
Josh Stein as he raised piles of advertising dollars to use Robinson’s own words against him.
BIDEN & IOWA: 4TH TIME’S THE CHARMBiden and Iowa: The fourth time’s the charm
On his fourth try, Joe Biden finally won Iowa.
For decades, Biden was rejected by his voters, from his first failed election campaign in the 1988 cycle through 2020, when he finished a distant fourth. In 2008, he won less than 1% of the caucus votes.
This time, Iowa wasn’t first and it was a primary, not a caucus, and Biden won easily.
His victory Tuesday came only after he was already a sitting president and after the state had been stripped of its prized leadership role and had voted with the masses.
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.