Millions of Americans head to the polls today on the second most anticipated Tuesday of any election year. The first is election day, November 5; Eight months earlier, on Super Tuesday, 16 states and one territory (American Samoa) will today elect a third of the total delegates to the national conventions, which will nominate the Democratic and Republican candidates for the White House in the summer.
This time, however, it does not have the usual expectation: only a surprise will prevent the two clear favorites, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, from sweeping and definitively paving the way for their direct confrontation in November. The focus will be on the forcefulness of their victories, as a first-time test of the electoral strength that they bring together just over half a year before the elections.
And, especially, in its weaknesses. Biden, who faces testimonial competition from Dean Phillips, already faced a protest vote in Michigan – exceeding 100,000 votes – over his administration's role in Gaza, and remains an unpopular candidate due to his old age, inflation and rising electoral weight of the immigration issue. For his part, Trump faces rejection from moderate Republicans, fed up with his almost daily controversies, his four criminal charges and his far-right rhetoric, increasingly xenophobic and conspiratorial.
The support of the latter is brought together by Nikki Haley, the only alternative candidate to the former president, who this Tuesday has the last great opportunity to hit the table. Despite her poor results in the primary elections held to date, she promised not to retire until Super Tuesday, when almost three times as many Republican delegates (874) as those that have been distributed to date (301) will be decided. ).
In the final stretch of this large-scale vote, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled in favor of Trump in his appeal against the ruling of the highest state court of Colorado, which had prohibited him from running in the primaries for his attempt to reverse the elections of the 2020 and the assault on the Capitol. This Monday's ruling allows his name to be on the ballots in that state and the other two in which similar decisions had been reached, Maine and Illinois.
The High Court had to make that decision more quickly than usual, since this Tuesday two of the three states that prevented Trump from participating, Maine and Colorado, voted.
Among the 16 that are in dispute today, there are also two of the three that distribute the most delegates, California (424 Democrats and 169 Republicans) and Texas (273 Democrats and 161 Republicans). The first is the main Democratic bastion in the country, which has been electing its candidates since 1988; in the second, a Republican has always won in the last 44 years, since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980.
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and American Samoa also hold primaries. However, this Tuesday, in Alaska there will only be Republican ballots, and in Iowa only Democrats, according to the electoral calendar decided by each party.
Of all of these, only one is among the so-called swing states: North Carolina. Analysts will look at the electoral strength of the two favorites in a place that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, for Mitt Romney in 2012, for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, with a margin of just over one point. In this state, both parties also hold gubernatorial primaries, which will serve to decide the candidates to succeed Democrat Roy Cooper, who has been in office since 2017.
The former governor of her neighboring state (South Carolina), Haley, achieved her first victory of the year in the Washington primary on Sunday. A vote without greater significance than the 19 delegates that it awards for the Republican convention in July in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). The results in the capital are testimonial because it is an eminently Democratic city (Biden achieved 92% of the votes in 2020) and little representative of the base of Republican affiliates throughout the country. Only about 2,000 people voted and they gave a comfortable and expected victory to Haley, with 63% of the votes.
But this victory, the first by a woman in a Republican primary in history, gives her a necessary boost ahead of Super Tuesday. After his resounding defeats in the rest of the elections held to date, tonight's result will determine his chances: if he loses a good handful of delegates, it will be very difficult for him to continue convincing his donors to maintain the multimillion-dollar flow to his campaign, and will definitively clear the way for Trump's candidacy.
