Trump Coasts to a Super Tuesday Blowout

They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing. Fifteen states and one territory are holding their primaries on Tuesday, and 854 Republican delegates are up for grabs. Donald Trump is cleaning up so far, and it looks like he’ll walk away from the election cycle’s largest single-day primary dump with the nomination all-but secured.

Trump will win the nomination once he secures 1,215 delegates, and for his sole opponent Nikki Haley, the math ain’t’ mathin’. Trump is a whisper away from finally making a rematch with President Biden official — especially considering Haley is now dropping out of the race.

The Associated Press called Virginia for Trump at 7:25 p.m. local time. The state was viewed as one of Haley’s best shots to win on Tuesday. Trump won North Carolina a little over half of an hour later. Then it was Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maine, Alabama, and Massachusetts — all within the next hour. He proceeded to notch Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, Minnesota, and California.

Haley won in Vermont, but that’s it.

The results aren’t surprising, but what has raised some eyebrows is how many Republican voters wouldn’t commit to voting for the party’s nominee in the general election in November. In Virginia, for example, only 26 percent of Nikki Haley supporters said they’d definitely support the eventual Republican nominee, according to CNN. In North Carolina, the number was 21 percent, according to CBS News.

Trump won all but one of the Republican primaries in the lead-up to Super Tuesday, with the former president securing decisive victories in Iowa, New Hampshire, and even Haley’s home state of South Carolina. In Nevada, Haley lost to the “none of these candidates” option listed on the ballot, while Trump breezed through the state’s caucuses a few days later. Haley managed to scrape up her first win in Washington, D.C., last week, but the 19 delegates awarded to her by the capital city barely register against the delegate wall built by Trump.

Trump’s dominance in the early states quickly shrank what was once a crowded field of Republican hopefuls. Contenders like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson all withdrew from the race after getting steamrolled by Trump in Iowa. Despite calls from within her own party for Haley to follow suit and bow out of the race, the former governor has remained defiant in her insistence to continue campaigning.

Ahead of the South Carolina primary, Haley gave a televised address in which she reiterated that she would continue her bid for the presidency through Super Tuesday, where over a third of the available delegates in the entire primary season would be distributed. At the same time, she abandoned any pretense of niceties with the Trump campaign, ramping up her attacks on the former president as an “unhinged and unstable” figure increasingly out of step with the vast majority of the country — and calling out Republicans who “privately” dread his return to power.

Trump addressed questions about his opponent during a Tuesday morning interview with Fox News. “She said she would never run against me and she did,” he complained to hosts Brian Kilmeade and Lawrence Jones. Ironically, the former president went on to accuse Haley of dishonesty. “She misrepresents a lot of facts,” he said, “She is not doing very well against Biden […] You gotta tell the facts, you gotta tell the truth. Trump added that he doesn’t “think in terms of Nikki Haley,” whom he constantly attacks, because Biden is “destroying our country.”

“There’s no path for her to win, whether she likes hearing that or not,” Trump said, accusing Haley of acting as a surrogate for Democrats, who he believes have been infiltrating primaries to skew results in her favor.

Haley herself seems disillusioned with at least one major GOP institution. On Sunday, she backed away from a pledge the Republican National Committee forced candidates to sign to participate in the primary cycle’s debates, in which GOP hopefuls promised to back the eventual Republican nominee. “I have always said that I have serious concerns about Donald Trump. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden,” Haley told MSNBC’s Kristen Welker when asked if she still felt bound by the promise.

“In order to get on that debate stage, you said yes,” Haley added. “The RNC is now not the same RNC.”

And while Haley’s electoral calculations have been consistently wrong, she’s spot on in her assessment of the current state of the RNC. Longtime party Chair Ronna McDaniel announced last month that she will step down from her position as chair of the RNC at the end of this week. McDaniel, who was selected for the position in 2016 with Trump’s support, decided amid pressure from the Trump campaign to end her tenure. Shortly before McDaniel officially announced her resignation, Trump endorsed North Carolina Republican Michael Whatley and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as 2024 RNC co-chairs. In February, Lara Trump suggested that under her purview, the RNC would consider using its coffers to help pay for the mountain of legal expenses incurred by her farther-in-law’s various criminal and civil court cases.

Trump walked away from Super Tuesday with a decisive victory, reinforcing his stranglehold on the Republican Party. It was too much for Haley, and now the path is cleared for the former president’s rematch with Biden.

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