7 things Super Tuesday just taught us about the November election

It’s the November rematch few Americans want — except the ones who keep voting for it.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden romped across the Super Tuesday map, easily wiping out their closest challengers and marching to the precipice of their respective nominations.

But while Tuesday’s elections served as a stark reminder of the grip both men have over their parties, they also offered the best glimpse yet of each candidates’ general election frailties — from Trump’s struggles with well-educated suburban voters to Biden’s protest votes over his policies in the Middle East in Democratic-leaning places like Minnesota.

Down the ballot, gamesmanship seemed to pay off for Adam Schiff as he coasted through the state’s top-two primary alongside a Republican who he is all but certain to beat. Elsewhere, hard-line Republicans advanced from key primaries, but potentially not without serious liabilities for some, like Mark Robinson, who easily won the North Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary.

Here are seven things Super Tuesday taught us about the general election:

The general election no one wanted

If Tuesday night cemented anything, it was that any lingering chance of Trump or Biden not getting through their primaries has become the stuff of fanfic fever dreams.

Large swaths of voters in both parties aren’t relishing a 2020 rematch, polls show. And now, they’re going to have to get used to it.

“The choice is not a great choice right now,” said one battleground Super Tuesday state Democratic Party chair, granted anonymity because this person wasn’t authorized by the Biden campaign to speak. “I’d rather both of them weren’t running.”

While Democratic voters have yet to be offered a compelling primary alternative to the president, the same isn’t necessarily true on the Republican side, where the electorate had a real alternative to choose from. But while Nikki Haley lost almost everywhere, she was still pulling 30 percent of the vote or more in some states.

“Most of Haley’s vote is anti-Trump, not pro-Haley,” said Mike Madrid, the Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Both Trump and Biden will have to contend with longshot independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now threatening to make the ballot in as many as six states, many of them battlegrounds. His campaign said Tuesday he had enough signatures to get on the ballot in Nevada. And a super PAC backing him says it has secured enough signatures to get him on ballots in Arizona, South Carolina and Georgia as well, though only the top election official in Utah has confirmed Kennedy will be on the November ballot.

And both major party candidates will have to face an electorate that, from the beginning of the race, expressed a desire to see someone else run. Like 2016, so-called “double haters” — the roughly 17 percent of voters who dislike both candidates, according to a recent Marquette University Law School national survey — stand to be the defining demographic of 2024.

Nikki Haley at a crossroads

Haley can no longer make the argument, as she has for weeks, that she is staying in the race because only a handful of states have voted. Once polls closed Tuesday, 25 states and territories had cast ballots this year for a Republican nominee — representing almost 50 percent of available delegates. Haley had managed to win just two of those contests.

Despite clinching Vermont on Tuesday, days after winning in Washington, D.C., Haley tanked in other states her campaign had eyed as fertile ground. After looking to places like Virginia, Colorado and Massachusetts to deliver much closer margins, Haley was on track to lose each by more than 25 points — and her gap with Trump in other states was significantly more.

Her departure from the race will likely come soon. The bigger question is not when she will end her candidacy, but what she will do about Trump when she does.

Besides a Fox and Friends appearance Tuesday morning, Haley spent the day and evening out of the public eye. But she still offered some hints about where her head was during what could be the final moments of her presidential campaign — and she wasn’t showing any openness to turning around and supporting Trump.

Haley rolled her eyes and shook her head when a Fox host asked her to confirm whether she was entirely against running on a third-party No Labels ticket, and if she will, in fact, support the Republican nominee. She said she had already stated she would not run on another party’s ticket, but declined to clarify her position on whether she will endorse Trump.

“That is not a decision I have to make today. The convention is not until July,” Haley said. The Fox host reminded her she had already signed an agreement to do so.

“I pledged I would support the nominee when I was on the debate stage,” Haley said. “I get to do what I want to do.”

Republicans may still have a Trump problem down ballot

You go into war with the candidates you have, not the candidates you want.

Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson would probably not be the first choice of GOP operative class for the North Carolina gubernatorial race, given his Trump-alignment and long list of scandals.

But he’s the darling of Tarheel State MAGA conservatives, and no serious, organized operation ever formed to oppose him, much to the chagrin of Bill Graham — a businessperson who poured millions of his own money into the primary with the expectation that outside help would come to back him up.

Robinson steamrolled to a primary victory Tuesday night despite over $1 million in attack ads against him from Graham. And the Republican Governors Association signaled it is more than willing — eager, even — to spend on his behalf in the open seat race against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

In one other down-ballot contest, Republicans did exhibit restraint. In North Carolina’s 1st District, the lone swing seat left in the state, Republicans wanted to avoid repeat candidate Sandy Smith — who faced domestic abuse allegations that she denies — from winning the nomination. Congressional Leadership Fund, the party’s main super PAC, spent to boost Army veteran Laurie Buckhout — and she edged past Smith for the right to face Democratic Rep. Don Davis in November.

But from Colorado to Virginia, it was clear that the GOP’s down-ballot problems will only be exacerbated by Trump’s problems in the suburbs. In Virginia, the former president lost suburbs like Alexandria and Arlington to Haley, along with the state capital of Richmond and city of Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. In Colorado, he lost Denver and Boulder.

“He consistently loses the most educated counties in every state,” said GOP pollster Christine Matthews. “In Virginia, this was definitely true, but it was true in South Carolina, too. And everywhere. ... I don’t think he wins them back by talking about how much Black voters love his mug shot T-shirt or let Russia attack NATO allies who haven’t paid their dues. “

Trump set out to remake the GOP into more of a working-class party — and November could test whether trading white-collar voters for blue-collar ones is a winning strategy in swing states.

Biden’s ‘uncommitted’ hump is real

Jason Palmer, a previously unknown businessperson from Maryland, snatched American Samoa away from Biden, raking in 51 votes compared to 40 for the president, without ever having set foot in the island territory. In doing so, he kept Biden from sweeping Tuesday night.

But it was in Minnesota, which hasn’t gone for a Republican for president since Richard Nixon in 1972, where Biden saw a less surprising but more threatening setback. The “uncommitted” option on the ballot there had as big a night as it did in Michigan, winning 19 percent of the vote with 89 percent counted. The state’s politically significant Somali population, concentrated around the Twin Cities, rebuked Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

Democrats “will come back home,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, chair of the Democratic Governors Association. “I think there is a frustration and again, our healthy political system, we want to express some of that, but these folks who, if they’re not voting for Joe Biden [now], they darn sure are by November.”

But come this fall, Biden can hardly afford such a defection in the pivotal blue wall state.

California gamesmanship paid off

Schiff may have ticked off liberals by elevating Republican Steve Garvey, but the gambit worked. Garvey easily beat out Democratic Rep. Katie Porter for the second spot in the general election — which means an almost-certain Schiff victory in the fall.

More than anything else, California was a test of the candidates’ and parties’ ability to navigate the jiu-jitsu of fighting in the top-two primary. And they appear to have pulled it off.

In addition to Schiff successfully dragging Garvey into the general election, Democrats appeared to have avoided a lockout in one of the state’s most competitive congressional districts, in the Central Valley, though the race for the seat currently held by GOP Rep. David Valadao was still too close to call early Wednesday morning.

Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority PAC, the top Democratic super PAC, spent to promote former state Assemblymember Rudy Salas, who lost to Valadao in 2022, over the other Democrat in the race, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado.

National Republicans, meanwhile, were eager to boost Valadao, a 2021 Trump impeacher who is likely the only GOP candidate who could keep the seat red in November. Wary of ending up with either an unelectable nominee or a split in the party’s vote, Congressional Leadership Fund, the House GOP-linked super PAC, hit conservative Chris Mathys in TV ads to drive down his Republican support.

There are still votes left to count, but Valadao and Salas ended Tuesday night as the clear 1-2 in the race.

The House GOP conference inched to the right

Conservatives fighting for greater influence within the volatile House GOP conference are getting some reinforcements.

Rep. Barry Moore — a member of the House Freedom Caucus who was drawn out of his seat last year — pulled off an upset in Alabama’s 1st Congressional District, defeating Republican Rep. Jerry Carl. In the final weeks of his campaign, Moore and his allies heavily touted Moore’s opposition for Ukraine funding.

Moore’s win came despite heavy spending against him, including six figures from Conservatives for American Excellence, a group bankrolled by hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin and investment banker Warren Stephens that played in Republican House primaries across the country in an attempt to block troublesome candidates.

That group, along with America Leads Action, a super PAC backed by wealthy donors Jay Faison and Rob Walton, spent a combined $2 million against Brandon Gill in Texas’ 26th District, a safe Republican seat left open by retiring Rep. Michael Burgess. Gill, the founder of the conservative DC Enquirer who helped work on a documentary promoting a conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election and vowed to join the Freedom Caucus, easily won that primary on Tuesday.

Both Moore and Gill had the backing of the conservative Club for Growth.

Conservatives for American Excellence and America Leads Action also dropped around $2 million to stop Mark Harris — whose apparent win in a congressional race in 2018 was tossed out after election fraud allegations against an operative paid by his campaign — from joining Congress in a safe Republican seat in North Carolina. But Harris appeared to be in the lead as of early Wednesday morning. Whether he will avoid a runoff was too close to call.

A disappointing night for the left

“Uncommitted” voters’ strong showing in Minnesota was the biggest bright spot in an otherwise disappointing night for progressives.

The problem wasn’t that, as some liberals feared, Porter and fellow Rep. Barbara Lee would split the progressive vote in California. As of early Wednesday morning, their vote shares combined still wouldn’t be good enough to vault over either Schiff or Garvey.

Liberals gave Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) a pass this year — the anti-abortion South Texan didn’t even have a primary opponent, even though a progressive challenger had forced him into a challenging runoff in 2022.

There are still a number of Democratic primaries — or top-two primaries for safely blue California seats — left uncalled that could net progressives significant victories.

With a bit over half of the vote in, California state Sen. Dave Min was a close second behind Republican Scott Baugh in the race to fill Porter’s House seat. If Min advances over fellow Democrat Joanna Weiss, it would be a serious rebuke of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which, along with several allied groups, poured millions into the southern California race in an attempt to take Min down. Beating AIPAC in such a high-profile race would be a big win for progressives.

But it was hardly as successful a night for progressives as they’ve had in some primaries past.