President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump took big steps toward making their seemingly inevitable rematch official, as both notched huge Super Tuesday wins.
More than a dozen states held primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, the biggest day of the nominating races so far as the 2024 presidential campaign accelerates and leaves the one-by-one march through early-voting states behind.
Both Biden and Trump saw familiar signs of potential general election weaknesses: progressives casting ballots for “uncommitted” rather than Biden, college-educated suburbanites choosing Haley over Trump.
But both also had much more to celebrate, as they moved closer to clinching their parties’ nominations with their near-sweeps.
Here are takeaways from Super Tuesday:
The former president continued his run of dominance in the Republican nominating contest, despite losing one state, Vermont, to Nikki Haley.
Though the 15 states that voted Tuesday didn’t have enough delegates for Trump to clinch the party’s nomination for a third consecutive presidential election, he moved much closer, and demonstrated that the door for Haley is all but shut.
Here’s the delegate math: Just before midnight, with many votes still being counted, CNN’s latest delegate estimate showed that Trump had picked up 617 delegates on Tuesday to Haley’s 23. Overall, Trump had 893 delegates — 92% of those awarded so far and closing in on the 1,215 he’ll need to clinch the GOP nomination. Haley had just 66.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is a big one. And they tell me, the pundits and otherwise, that there’s never been one like this,” Trump said at his election night watch party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
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