Super Tuesday elections bring Biden, Trump closer to winning their party’s nominations

Open this photo in gallery:

A November presidential rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is not quite yet a mathematical certainty. But it is now the nearest thing to a political certainty, after Mr. Trump strengthened his domination of Republican voting with a near sweep of the states voting on Super Tuesday, the single largest day of the primary calendar.

The front-runner cruised to victory in all but one of the states that had reported Tuesday votes by midnight, from population powerhouses Texas and California – the latter offers the largest trove of delegates in primary voting – to mid-size states such as Colorado, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

He was beaten in Vermont, the liberal New England state where rival Nikki Haley claimed her first state victory, after also winning in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Biden, too, tallied a Super Tuesday loss. He was beaten in American Samoa, where a local caucus that collected just 91 ballots voted 51 to 40 for Jason Palmer, a little-known businessman.

Elsewhere, however, Mr. Biden enjoyed the overpowering wins that have accrued to a sitting president who has seen only token opposition in the Democratic primaries.

Mr. Biden, in a statement, cast ahead to the general election in November, as he prepares for another presidential campaign against Mr. Trump. “My message to the country is this: Every generation of Americans will face a moment when it has to defend democracy,” Mr. Biden said, calling on voters of all stripes to vote for him, an incumbent with weak approval ratings.

As Biden-Trump rematch becomes more certain, Super Tuesday raises other questions

Super Tuesday also provided warnings for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. In the Minnesota Democratic primary, 19 per cent of the vote went to “uncommitted,” a ballot option used to register protest against Mr. Biden for his administration’s support of Israel. That figure eclipses the 13 per cent who voted uncommitted in Michigan.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, continues to see considerable opposition from within the Republican party. Across the Super Tuesday states, nearly a quarter of the votes tallied by midnight were marked for Ms. Haley, an indication that many conservatives continue to harbour misgivings about the former president.

In a speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump suggested the party would fall in line behind him.

“We want to have unity and we’re going to have unity – and it’s going to happen very quickly,” he said, praising his own Super Tuesday performance. “There’s never been anything so conclusive,” he said, reprising familiar campaign messages rather than delivering a message intended to reassure conservatives skeptical of his candidacy.

Perhaps the greatest unanswered Super Tuesday question is the fate of Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who outlasted a dozen other candidates to become Mr. Trump’s final major competitor for the Republican crown. She would need to win an overwhelming majority of the remaining primary votes to secure the candidacy, but has so far continued her campaign, pointing on Tuesday night to weaknesses in her rival.

“Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump. That is not the unity our party needs for success,” Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for Ms. Haley, said in a statement.

Despite handily losing all but one of the previous contests to Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley has so far remained in the race, vowing to stay in at least until Super Tuesday. But falling too far behind could make it impossible to continue fundraising and kneecap her campaign.

Although Mr. Trump racked up dominant victories in early-voting states, Tuesday’s contests are the first to add significantly to his delegate count. By next week, when Georgia and Washington State vote, he could amass an insurmountable majority.

Mr. Trump has triumphed despite facing 91 criminal charges, including several for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, two civil court judgments against him worth hundreds of millions of dollars and a platform that has drawn accusations of authoritarianism.

He had one legal headache lifted this week when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, overturned an attempt by Colorado’s top court to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. The case turned on the interpretation of the 14th amendment to the Constitution, which bars insurrectionists from holding federal office. The Supreme Court, however, ruled that only the federal government and not state officials could determine who had taken part in an insurrection and should therefore be banned from power.

Open this photo in gallery:

Despite all of Mr. Trump’s legal travails, he has been able to attract new voters, including Arron Ochs, 51, who had never voted before Tuesday – not in any election. He came out despite being sick with bronchitis.

“It’s just hitting me too hard now, with gas prices and a lot of things going up – our food, energy. It’s just time to make change,” he said after casting a ballot for Mr. Trump in Twain Harte, a small California town set among the pine trees of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Mr. Trump is “going to set our country straight again,” added his father-in-law, Michael Warren, who was critical of current political leaders “spending all our money on all these illegals coming into our country. Not good. Not good.”

Ms. Haley assailed Mr. Trump for praising dictators, threatening to abandon NATO allies to Russian invasion and running a drama-filled White House during his time in office. “Chaos follows him,” she often said. She pointed to polling that shows a strong majority of Americans do not want Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden to run again, casting both as tired and angry old men.

She held out hope for an upset in moderate states such as New Hampshire, as well as in her home state of South Carolina. But in both cases, Mr. Trump won easily. Her sole victory came in the District of Columbia, where the small contingent of Republicans in the country’s capital lined up for her this past weekend.

Ms. Haley’s hopes Tuesday were focused on Virginia, where much of her party’s pre-Trump establishment lives in the Washington suburbs, and moderate Minnesota.

But she attracted accusations of pandering to bigotry when she failed to cite slavery as the cause of the Civil War and suggested there was nothing wrong with liking the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride. After such episodes, she tightened her campaign events, eschewing questions from the audience.

Mr. Trump, for his part, campaigned hard on his signature issue: rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants while closing the country to asylum seekers, at a time when migration at the southern border has reached record levels.

He has also argued that it is time to end the war in Ukraine, which likely would mean pushing for territorial concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin. His platform includes provisions for purging the civil service and installing more political appointees, while in interviews he has floated using the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.

In California, voter Cary Dahl saw Ms. Haley’s polished persona as a liability rather than an asset. “She’s wishy-washy and I don’t think she would be a good person as a president,” he said, adding Mr. Trump is “not afraid.”

His wife, Monica Dahl, said during his time in office, “he wasn’t backing down from people who are trying to screw us.” She referred to the famously inarticulate Mr. Biden as “this guy who can’t even form a sentence.”

California Republicans amended their primary voting rules this year to provide all 169 of the state’s delegates to any candidate who secures a simple majority of the vote. That change provided a windfall of delegates to Mr. Trump, who has proven as popular among conservatives in liberal California as he has elsewhere in the country.

“America is being attacked from inside and from out. And the only person who can pull this off, and stop the elitists from doing this crap, is President Trump,” said Randy Miller, a retired fire chief. He faulted other Republicans for elitism, and “trying to make America into a Europe. And we’re not going to go for it.”