Super (predictable) Tuesday: Trump, Biden sweep most races in busy primary voting day
Nikki Haley beats Trump in Vermont, but Trump closes in on nomination
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.
As of early Wednesday, Trump had won at least 635 delegates from Super Tuesday states so far, bringing his total delegates to more than 750. He needs 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.
Biden and Trump had each won Utah, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
A day earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Colorado 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 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.
Haley appears to notch final win
Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Iowa and Vermont, while The Associated Press was able to call Alaska for Trump by 2:30 a.m. ET, with Haley not earning than one-quarter of the vote in any Alaskan district.
Vermont was the site of a rare triumph for Haley, who won the state's Republican primary by a narrow margin over Trump. It was her second primary win, following a D.C. victory over the weekend.
But shortly after 6 a.m. ET on Wednesday, it was reported by multiple media outlets that she would suspend her campaign later in the day.
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.
Her campaign website doesn't list any upcoming events.
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 has encountered few headwinds in the campaign despite facing legal peril. Trump has been hit with 91 criminal counts across four indictments, related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election win for Biden and allegations of unlawful possession of government documents — most classified and several top secret — after leaving office. On March 25, he will face criminal trial in New York over allegations of falsifying business records in order to hide stories of rumoured extramarital affairs during the 2016 presidential campaign.
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."
Signs of a Gaza protest vote in Minnesota
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.
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. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, billionaire Michael Bloomberg's only win came in the territory.
Residents of U.S. territories vote in primaries but do not have representation in the Electoral College.
More worrisome for the Biden campaign than the America Samoa result are pockets of discontent over the administration's response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Allies of the "uncommitted" movement pushed a protest vote 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 represented 19 per cent of all votes counted. That exceeded the 13 per cent of voters who selected "uncommitted" in Michigan last week.
"Joe Biden has not done enough to earn my vote and not done enough to stop the war, stop the massacre [in Gaza]," said Sarah Alfaham of the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington.
'Both of them failed'
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.
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.
State of the Union address this week
Biden will get another chance to make a pitch to voters like Hadley when he delivers the State of the Union address Thursday.
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.
With files from CBC News