President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump romped through the opening contests of Super Tuesday, piling up wins in states including Texas, the second-largest delegate prize of the night, as they moved inexorably toward their parties’ nominations and a rematch for the White House in November.
As The Associated Press called race after race, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was left pinning her hopes on tiny Vermont, where she and Trump were locked in a tight contest that could block a total sweep. If she cannot secure Vermont, a Democratic state that nonetheless elected a moderate Republican governor in 2016, it was hard to see what state she could win.
On the Democratic side, Biden won overwhelmingly in every state called by The Associated Press so far on his way to his own expected sweep.
For Haley, Super Tuesday quickly shaped up to be a major disappointment. After winning the Republican primary in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, she was hoping the northern Virginia suburbs would mirror the city across the Potomac River and deliver the state of Virginia to her. They did not. After that, one state after another slipped from her grasp.
Texas and North Carolina offered the second- and third-largest troves of delegates Tuesday, with 235 between them — eclipsed only by California, where polls were to close later in the night. Trump also won Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia.
The contests Tuesday night will all but determine the presidential candidates for the November election and shape Congress and statehouses for next year and beyond.
Despite having no major opponents for his party’s nomination, Biden faces a test: the popularity of the “uncommitted” ballot option as a protest vote in states like Minnesota, where Palestinian rights activists hope to deliver a message to the president on his policies toward Israel. Biden is scheduled to give the State of the Union address on Thursday.
For Haley’s campaign, it was seemingly a do-or-die moment. She has weathered defeat after defeat, but she insisted that she would stay in the race at least until Super Tuesday to give voters in those states the opportunity to make their voices heard. Haley was back in the Charleston, South Carolina, area Tuesday after a national campaign swing, with no public events planned.
In North Carolina, the same Republican voters who sided with Trump selected Mark Robinson — the state’s conservative lieutenant governor, who has a history of offensive and polarizing comments — to run for governor in November. Democrats selected a very different candidate, the mild-mannered, popular state attorney general, Josh Stein, to run against Robinson in a contest to succeed North Carolina’s term-limited Democratic governor, Roy Cooper.
There were important House and Senate races in California, where the top two finishers regardless of party move on to the general election. A number of high-profile Democrats were competing for the seat previously held by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and primaries in a few key House districts will lay down the battle lines for efforts to win control of the House later this year.
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