 "Super Tuesday takeaways: Biden, Trump dominate and end looks nigh for Haley")
Super Tuesday is in the books.
President Joe Biden and his presumptive Republican opponent Donald Trump absolutely dominated polls held across 15 states and one US territory.
Biden and Trump racked up hundreds of delegates each to all but sew up their parties’ nominations for the upcoming battle in November.
Nikki Haley, meanwhile, who had vowed to stay in the race past Super Tuesday, emerged with a solitary victory in Vermont.
So, what are the key takeaways from Super Tuesday?
Let’s take a closer look:
Trump buries Haley but…
Trump nearly swept Haley in the Republican contests.
Trump won California, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
According to BBC, Trump won by 70 per cent in Alabama, 61 per cent in Texas, and 70 per cent in California.
While Haley was able to stop Trump short of a clean sweep thanks to her Vermont victory, the former president brushed her aside in Virginia, Massachusetts and Maine — all states that could have conceivably backed the former governor and which have huge swaths of moderate voters who came out for Haley in earlier contests.
Haley’s challenge has highlighted some of Trump’s potential general election vulnerabilities. She has reached 40 per cent in some state contests, performing particularly well among independent, well-educated and suburban voters who could play a crucial role in battleground states in November.
Impact Shorts
View AllBut NBC reported that Haley fell short of that 40 per cent mark, which she has repeatedly pointed to highlight Trump’s general election vulnerabilities, in both Massachusetts and Virginia.
About one-third of North Carolina voters said Trump would not be fit to serve as president if he was convicted of a crime, while in Virginia, 53 per cent said he would be fit for the office if convicted.
According to BBC, just 21 per cent of Haley supporters in the state said they would vote Republican “no matter who it is” in the general election.
Trump has also shown vulnerabilities with influential voter blocs, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as areas with high concentrations of Independents.
That includes Minnesota, a state Trump did not carry in his otherwise overwhelming Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for Haley, he said, because the GOP “needs a course correction.”
De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he has never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
Trump also lost a third of the vote to Haley in Colorado, according to USA Today.
GOP strategist Karl Rove, on Fox News Tuesday night, said Trump “ought to be concerned about unifying the Republican Party.”
But Trump seemed eager to declare victory and move on.
“There’s never been anything so conclusive,” Trump was quoted as saying by USA Today.
“We have a great Republican Party with tremendous talent and we want to have unity, and we’re going to have unity. “And it’s going to happen very quickly.”
The warning signs are flashing for Trump. The question: is anybody paying attention?
Will Haley drop out?
That’s the big question.
The results come in the aftermath of Haley’s victory in the Washington DC primary — for which Trump declared her ‘queen of the swamp.’
More importantly, the results come after the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity — a big Haley donor — stopped funding the ex-governor’s campaign have ratcheted up the pressure on the last woman standing to exit the Republican race and endorse Trump.
Haley watched the election results in private and had no campaign events scheduled going forward.
Her campaign said in a statement that the results reflected there were many Republicans “who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump.”
“Unity is not achieved by simply claiming ‘we’re united,’” spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said.
Regardless of what she or the campaign says, it may just be a matter of time before Haley has to bid goodbye to her dreams of becoming the Republican nominee.
Republicans focussed on immigration and economy
Immigration and the economy were leading concerns for Republican voters, Edison exit polls in California, North Carolina and Virginia showed.
A majority of Republican voters in those states said they backed deporting illegal immigrants. Trump, who frequently denigrates migrants, has promised to mount the largest deportation effort in US history if elected.
Katherine Meredith, a 65-year-old homemaker, voted for Trump in California’s Huntington Beach.
“The border is a complete catastrophe,” she said.
At the same time, Republican voters seem to be growing more comfortable with the idea that their nominee could be convicted of a felony.
According to exit polls conducted by Edison, less than a quarter — 23 per cent — of those who voted in the California primary believe Trump would be unfit to serve as president if convicted of a crime.
The electorate that votes in the California primary skews conservative, as the state allows only registered Republicans to vote. But that 23 per cent figure is far lower than the tallies in other conservative states such as Iowa and South Carolina, where more than 30 per cent of respondents said Trump would not be fit to serve if convicted.
Trump faces multiple federal and state charges for his role in attempting to subvert the 2020 election, as well as federal charges over his handling of classified documents and a New York state case concerning hush-money payments to a porn star. It looks increasingly likely that resolution of those cases could drag past the election.
Biden sails through
Biden won the Democratic contests in California, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Utah, Vermont and Iowa.
According to USA Today, Biden got around 90 per cent of the vote in most states.
While that is a truly commanding performance, some would argue it was expected for an incumbent with no real challengers.
Biden had been expected to sail through the Democratic contests, though a protest vote in Minnesota organised by activists opposed to his forceful support of Israel attracted unexpectedly strong results.
The “uncommitted” vote in Minnesota stood at nearly 20 per cent with more than half the estimated vote counted, according to Edison, higher even than the 13 per cent that a similar effort in Michigan drew last week. Biden nevertheless won Minnesota and 14 other states, including a mail-in vote in Iowa that ended on Tuesday.
“Tonight’s numbers showed that President Biden cannot earn back our votes with just rhetoric,” Vote Uncommitted MN spokesperson Asma Nizami told BBC. “Over 35,000 Minnesotans made it clear that Democrats want Joe Biden to change his policies.”
The only contest Biden lost Tuesday was the Democratic caucus in American Samoa, a tiny US territory in the South Pacific Ocean. Biden was defeated by previously unknown candidate Jason Palmer, 51 votes to 40.
But….
The president faces low approval ratings and polls suggesting that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old running again.
His easy Michigan primary win last week was spoiled slightly by a similarly “uncommitted” campaign organised by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Allies of the “uncommitted” movement pushed similar protest votes elsewhere, such as in Minnesota, which has a significant population of Muslims, including in its Somali American community.
At least 45,000 voters in Minnesota selected “uncommitted,” which won 19 per cent with almost all votes counted. That exceeds the 13 per cent of voters who selected “uncommitted” in Michigan.
“Joe Biden has not done enough to earn my vote and not done enough to stop the war, stop the massacre,” said Sarah Alfaham of the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington.
Biden also is the oldest president ever and Republicans key on any verbal slip he makes. His aides insist that sceptical voters will come around once it is clear that either Trump or Biden will be elected again in November.
Biden, who will deliver the State of the Union address Thursday, will then campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Trouble with nonwhite voters?
Perhaps most worrisome for the Biden campaign on Tuesday were exit polls from California that showed Trump crushing Haley among nonwhite voters.
According to Edison, Trump bested Haley with those voters, most of whom were Hispanic, 72 per cent to 23 per cent. California has been the most diverse state to hold a Republican primary this year with 36 per cent of respondents classifying themselves as “nonwhite.”
Hispanics and other nonwhite voters are at the core of the Democratic constituency. Trump, however, trailed Biden among Hispanics by just 10 percentage points - 27 per cent to 37 per cent - in a January Reuters/Ipsos poll, with the rest of voters undecided or planning to vote for someone else or not all.
Biden beat Trump among Hispanics by about 20 percentage points in the 2020 election.
Other recent opinion polls have shown Trump gaining strength among nonwhite voters, particularly from the working class. In the California poll, 24 per cent of voters said they lacked a college degree.
The rematch is on
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump or Biden to formally become their parties’ presumptive nominees.
But the primary’s biggest day made their rematch a near-certainty.
Both the 81-year-old Biden and the 77-year-old Trump continue to dominate their parties despite facing questions about age and neither having broad popularity across the general electorate.
Despite Biden’s and Trump’s domination of their parties, polls make it clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds a majority of Americans don’t think either Biden or Trump has the necessary mental acuity for the job.
“Both of them failed, in my opinion, to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Rather than barnstorming the states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events last week along the US-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday night was packed for a victory party.
Among those attending were staff and supporters, including the rapper Forgiato Blow and former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The crowd erupted as Fox News, playing on screens around the ballroom, announced that the former president had won North Carolina’s GOP primary.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” Trump told a raucous crowd. He went on to attack Biden over the US-Mexico border and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden didn’t give a speech but instead issued a statement warning that Tuesday’s results had left Americans with a clear choice and touting his own accomplishments after beating Trump.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is at risk,” Biden said. “He is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people.”
With inputs from agencies
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