U.S. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump racked up wins across the country in the Super Tuesday primary elections, moving them closer to a historic rematch in the Nov. 5 presidential election despite a lack of enthusiasm from many voters.
The results could ramp up pressure on Nikki Haley, Trump’s last major rival, to leave the race.
Super Tuesday features elections in 16 states and one territory — from Alaska and California to Vermont and Virginia.
Hundreds of delegates are at stake, the biggest haul of the race for either party.
Biden and Trump had each won Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
The Associated Press projected both Trump and Biden would win their respective races in California — the state with the largest number of delegates for either party. Polls closed and vote counting began at 8:00 p.m. PT/11:00 p.m. ET.
Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Utah, Iowa and Vermont.
Vermont was the site of a rare triumph for Haley, who won the state’s Republican primary by a narrow margin over Trump.
That victory will do little to dent Trump’s primary dominance, however. The former president won 11 other states on Super Tuesday, including Colorado.
A day earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state could not remove him from the presidential primary ballot in an attempt to hold the former president accountable for his actions leading to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
The spotlight, however, remains on the 81-year-old Biden and the 77-year-old Trump, who continue to dominate their parties despite both facing questions about their age and neither commanding broad popularity across the general electorate.
Trump’s celebrated Tuesday’s wins at a packed victory party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” Trump told a raucous crowd.
He went on to attack Biden over the U.S.-Mexico border and the U.S. 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.”
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Haley last remaining Republican challenger
The former president has nonetheless already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now faces Haley, his former UN ambassador.
She has maintained strong fundraising and notched her second primary victory in Vermont, after a win over the weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans.
Trump scoffed that Haley had been “crowned queen of the swamp” after his loss in Saturday’s primary.
Haley, who has argued both Biden and Trump are too old to return to the White House, spent election night watching results in the Charleston, S.C. area where she lives. The former South Carolina governor lost her home state primary to Trump last month.
Her campaign website doesn’t list any upcoming events. Still, her aides insisted that the mood at her watch party was “jubilant.”
Biden takes a small hit in South Pacific
Trump wasn’t the only frontrunner to lose a Super Tuesday race.
Biden came in second in American Samoa, losing the South Pacific territory’s caucuses to a relatively unknown Democrat, 52-year-old entrepreneur Jason Palmer.
Out of 91 ballots cast in the territory’s caucus, Palmer won 51 and Biden won 40, according to the local party.
The outcome will hardly derail Biden’s march toward his party’s nomination.
Only six delegates were at stake in the U.S. territory, a tiny collection of islands in the South Pacific with fewer than 50,000 residents.
Residents of U.S. territories vote in primaries but do not have representation in the Electoral College.
American Samoa has been the site of quixotic victories before. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s only win came in the territory.
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Rematch on the horizon
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump or Biden to formally become their parties’ presumptive nominees.
The earliest is March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden.
But in a departure from most previous Super Tuesdays, both nominations are effectively settled, with Biden and Trump looking ahead to a reprise of the 2020 general election.
“We have to beat Biden — he is the worst president in history,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox & Friends.
Biden countered with a pair of radio interviews aimed at shoring up his support among Black voters, who helped anchor his 2020 coalition.
“If we lose this election, you’re going to be back with Donald Trump,” Biden said on the DeDe in the Morning radio show hosted by DeDe McGuire.
“The way he talks about, the way he acted, the way he has dealt with the African American community, I think, has been shameful.”
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 Centre 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, N.C.
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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 U.S.-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to restore Trump to primary ballots following attempts, in Colorado and other states, to ban him for his role in helping spark the Capitol riot, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal counts against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.
“Fight your fight yourself,” Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.”
State of the Union address this week
Biden delivers the State of the Union address Thursday, then will 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, increased wages and household wealth, and lower prescription drug and energy costs,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in a statement.
LaBolt also drew a contrast with 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 called attention to Trump’s most provocative statements that evoked Adolf Hitler by declaring that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. and suggesting flippantly that he would serve as a 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 indictments.
That drew another rebuke from Democrats around the country for comparing personal legal struggles to the historical injustices Black people have faced in the U.S.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that former president Donald Trump cannot be removed from the ballot in Colorado or any other state. Colorado had barred Trump from its Republican primary, arguing he incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but the justices said only U.S. Congress has that authority.