Millions of Americans went to the polls yesterday on the second most anticipated Tuesday of the entire election year. The first is the day of the presidential elections, November 5; eight months earlier, on Super Tuesday, 16 states and one territory (American Samoa) elect a third of the total delegates for the national conventions, which will nominate the Democratic and Republican candidates for the White House in the summer. This time, however, there was not the usual expectation, given the two clear favorites, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but rather it was a test of the electoral strength they have gathered just over half a year before the elections.
And especially, also, of their weaknesses. Biden, who faces testimonial competition from Dean Phillips, already faced a protest vote in Michigan — which exceeded 100,000 votes — over his administration’s role in Gaza, and remains an unpopular candidate because of his old age. , due to inflation and the growing electoral weight of the migration issue. For his part, Trump faces the rejection of moderate Republicans, fed up with his almost daily controversies, his four criminal charges and his far-right rhetoric, which is increasingly xenophobic and conspiratorial.
The support of the latter was brought together by Nikki Haley, the only alternative candidate to the former president, who yesterday had her last great opportunity. Despite his poor results in the primary appointments, he promised that he would not retire until Super Tuesday, in which almost three times as many Republican delegates (874) as have been distributed so far (301) were decided.
In the final stretch of this large-scale vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump in his appeal against the ruling of the highest state court in Colorado that had barred him from running in the primaries for his attempt to reverse the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol. Monday’s decision allowed his name to appear on the ballots in that state and the two others where similar decisions had been reached, Maine and Illinois. The high court had to make the decision more quickly than usual, since two of the three states that prevented Trump from participating, Maine and Colorado, were voting yesterday.
Among the 16 states in contention were also two of the three most delegate-sharing states, California (424 Democrats and 169 Republicans) and Texas (273 Democrats and 161 Republicans). The first is the main Democratic stronghold of the country, which has elected its candidates since 1988; the second has always been won by a Republican in the last 44 years, since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and American Samoa also held primaries. However, there were only Republican ballots in Alaska, and Democratic ballots in Iowa, according to the election calendar decided by each party.
Of all these, there is only one of the so-called swing states: North Carolina, which voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, with a margin of little more than a point. In that state, both parties were also holding gubernatorial primaries to decide candidates to succeed Democrat Roy Cooper, who has been in office since 2017.
The former governor of the neighboring state, South Carolina, Nikki Haley, won her first victory of the year in the Washington primaries on Sunday, a vote with no more significance than the 19 delegates she awards for the Republican convention in July in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). The results in the capital are testament to the fact that it is an eminently Democratic city (Biden won 92% of the vote in 2020) and is not representative of the base of Republican affiliates across the country. Only about 2,000 people voted and gave Haley a comfortable and expected victory, with 63% of the vote. But this victory, the first by a woman in a Republican primary in history, gave her a necessary boost. After his resounding defeats in the rest of the elections held so far, last night’s result determined his chances: losing a handful of delegates made it very difficult to continue convincing his donors to keep the multibillion-dollar flow to to his campaign, and would have definitely cleared the way for Trump’s candidacy.
