Haley Has Little Hope on Super Tuesday. But Today’s Races Hold a Lot More Intrigue.

The most recent Super Tuesday, in 2020, was when Joe Biden essentially secured the Democratic nomination for president. After picking up much-needed momentum in a South Carolina blowout and coalescing numerous felled challengers behind his candidacy, Biden won the majority of states and delegates up for grabs. While his main competitor, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, would linger in the race for some time, Sanders’ fate was sealed on Super Tuesday.

Things are not as gripping this time around. Fifteen states, plus American Samoa, will host GOP nominating contests, and Donald Trump could sweep them all. Democrats will get results from 16 contests too, and Biden is expected to win them all.

There will, however, be some tea leaves to read from the results, even if their outcomes aren’t particularly in question. And Super Tuesday will host some of the biggest down-ballot primaries of the cycle in five states, including Texas and California. Here’s what we’ll be watching for.

Nikki Haley is coming off her first primary victory of the cycle—in Washington, a quaint affair in which she received 1,274 votes from pollgoers who could cast their votes at only one hotel. For Haley, this victory creates something between momentum and the opposite of it—it creates nothing, let’s say—as the D.C. primary might be the only one you don’t necessarily want to win. The Trump campaign on Sunday observed that Haley “was just crowned Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”

Although no Super Tuesday state’s Republican primary electorate is as monstrous, putrid, and frankly disgusting as D.C.’s—in other words, higher-educated and wealthier—Haley will be trying to take advantage of Super Tuesday states with similar profiles. She’ll fare poorly, for example, in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, but states with more white-collar GOP primary voters, like Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Maine, and Minnesota are where she could perform best and have a chance to accumulate delegates. It calls to mind Sen. Marco Rubio’s strategy in 2016, when he was working with a similar coalition as Haley’s.

But as you may recall, Rubio did not become president in 2016, and neither will Haley in 2024. Trump can’t mathematically clinch a majority of delegates on Super Tuesday, but he could come awfully close. So the question is less what happens on Super Tuesday than what Haley does in the aftermath. She hasn’t pledged to go forward regardless of what happens on Tuesday, as she has before previous contests she was fated to lose. So long as Haley’s campaign bank account is in the black, she could stay in the race as long as she’d like, serving as a receptacle for the fleeting hopes of anti-Trump Republicans. But given that Trump could reach a majority of delegates by March 12 or 19, “as long as she’d like” isn’t much longer.

Biden won the Michigan Democratic primary last week with 81 percent of the vote. Most of the analytical muscle afterward, however, was devoted to the 13 percent, or roughly 100,000 Michiganders, who voted “uncommitted,” many in protest of Biden’s handling of the Israel–Hamas war. Democratic primary voters in numerous other states will have protest options available to them beyond the human form of actual primary challenger Dean Phillips. Surely any meaningful number—say, something that cracks double digits in a state like Washington, Colorado, or Minnesota—will be picked over to demonstrate Biden’s intracoalitional weaknesses.

But it’s a tell about the lackluster nature of this Super Tuesday that so much punditry will be devoted to weaknesses in Trump’s or Biden’s coalition. We could read deep within the primary results for signs of general election difficulties … or we could just look at the existing general election polling. That polling, at the moment, shows Trump with an edge over Biden, with Biden performing worse among swing voters than he did in 2020. Soon, we can dispense with digesting primary results and move on to the main course.

The marquee Senate primary of the night takes place in California, for the seat long held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Under California election rules, the top two contenders among all candidates, regardless of party, will advance to the general election in November.

Polling averages ahead of the race show Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff ahead of the pack, with Republican baseball man Steve Garvey in second and Rep. Katie Porter in third. (Rep. Barbara Lee, a favorite of the left, is polling in a distant fourth.) The race has been notable in recent weeks as Schiff has sought to elevate Garvey’s standing, seeing him as easy pickings in the general election. Porter, while lambasting Schiff’s tactics, has spent money on trying to boost the standing of a different Republican candidate, in order to draw some GOP voters away from Garvey and allow her to slip into the second slot. Were the polling to be roughly accurate, though, Schiff seems in best shape to become a United States senator. In November, he would either face off against a Republican in a safely blue state or be the more moderate, establishment-backed candidate among two Democrats.

Senate primaries are largely advertising arms races between mechanized war machines. It’s primaries for the House of Representatives where true beauty (horror) can emerge.

In Alabama, a court-mandated redistricting has prompted the first member-on-member primary of the cycle, between GOP Reps. Jerry Carl and Barry Moore in Alabama’s 1^st District. As Slate’s Molly Olmstead has shown, there’s essentially nothing separating these two, aside from differing perceptions of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. It’s a contest about which replacement-level member can most effectively exude MAGA. May the best performer win.

In Texas’ 23^rd District, covering a broad swath of the southern border in West Texas, Rep. Tony Gonzales is facing off a series of primary challengers after casting sacrilege votes on gun safety and same-sex marriage, and after having some humanity toward migrants. At least some of Gonzales’ four primary opponents may have been taunted into the race, as Gonzales had dared challengers to take him on so that he might “run you into the deep end of the pool every single time and drown you.” Among Gonzales’ challengers is a certain Brandon Herrera, a “firearms manufacturer and a YouTube personality who calls himself ‘The AK Guy.’ ” As with other Texas elections, this one will head to a May runoff if no candidate gets a majority of the votes.

In California’s 22^nd District, the Democratic Party establishment wants State Assemblymember Rudy Salas to face off against Rep. David Valadao, a moderate Republican survivor—and one of the two remaining House Republicans who have voted to impeach Donald Trump—in a Democratic-leaning district. But with help from EMILY’s List, Democratic state Sen. Melissa Hurtado has thrown a wrench into that plan. There’s now a real possibility that the split Democratic vote could lock both Democrats out of the top two, ceding one of the party’s best pickup opportunities to Republicans. The potential for a nightmare scenario due to California’s primary system is a regular headache for Democrats.

On the other coast, there’s a wide-open primary in the 6^th District of North Carolina’s freshly re-gerrymandered map, and it has caused some split loyalties. Bo Hines—who lost his bid for the seat in 2022 despite Trump’s taking a liking to him—is running again, but this time Trump has endorsed an opponent, Addison McDowell, a wholesome country health insurance lobbyist. (Hines does, however, have the Club for Growth’s endorsement.) Former Rep. Mark Walker is also running, as is veteran Christian Castelli. It’s these last two who have been caught in a Timely News Controversy recently, with a pro-Castelli PAC posting A.I.–generated audio of Walker saying things like, “Just between you and me, I know I’m not qualified for the job in Congress.” This is what politics is from now on—congratulations to politics!

Last year, the Texas House, led by Speaker Dade Phelan, impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton. By rah-rah-ing the base and getting Trump on his defense, though, Paxton was acquitted in the state Senate.

Paxton has since launched a revenge tour against his impeachers, endorsing a slew of candidates running against them and making Phelan his top target. Trump has joined the crusade against Phelan, endorsing his opponent, David Covey. Is Covey leaning on his Trump endorsement a bit? Eh, a little. Here’s the entire script of one Covey ad:

Paxton, by the way, goes on trial for securities fraud next month.