Biden and Trump started the evening by winning Virginia. Biden also won Vermont and Iowa, where Democrats previously held a presidential preference contest but only announced their results on Tuesday | File image
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have begun scoring early victories as states across the country hold Super Tuesday elections. bringing them closer to a historic rematch despite a lack of enthusiasm among many voters.
Super Tuesday features elections in 16 states and one territory, from Alaska and California to Vermont and Virginia. Hundreds of delegates are at stake, which is the biggest payoff of the race for either side.
Biden and Trump started the evening by winning Virginia. Biden also won Vermont and Iowa, where Democrats previously held a presidential preference contest but did not announce their results until Tuesday.
While most attention is focused on the presidential race, there are also important voting rounds. California voters will choose candidates who will compete for the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein. The race for governor will take shape in North Carolina, a state that is hotly contested by both parties heading into November. And in Los Angeles, a progressive prosecutor is trying to fend off an intense reelection challenge in a contest that could serve as a barometer of crime politics.
However, the spotlight remains on 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Trump, who continue to dominate their parties despite both facing questions about their ages and neither enjoying widespread popularity among the general electorate.
The earliest either can become his party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden. But in a departure from most previous Super Tuesdays, both nominations have effectively been settled, with Biden and Trump both looking ahead to a repeat of the 2020 general election. Trump still faces one major challenger, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, but has focused mainly on Biden in his meetings and interviews.
We have to beat Biden, he is the worst president in history, Trump said on Fox & Friends on Tuesday.
Biden responded with a pair of radio interviews to shore up his support among Black voters, who helped anchor his 2020 coalition.
If we lose this election, you’re going to come back to Donald Trump, Biden said on the DeDe in the Morning show hosted by DeDe McGuire. The way he talks about the African-American community, the way he acted, the way he treated the African-American community, I think has been shameful.
Despite Biden and Trump’s dominance of their parties, polls make clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that a majority of Americans do not think Biden or Trump have the necessary mental acuity for the job.
In my opinion, both have failed to unite this country, said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the uniqueness of this year’s campaign. Instead of storming states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events along the U.S.-Mexico border last week, each trying to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to return Trump to the primary ballot following efforts to ban him over his role in helping to incite the riot at the Capitol, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal charges against him in seeking to target Biden accusing them of arming the courts.
Fight your own battle, Trump said. Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.
Biden will deliver the State of the Union address on Thursday and will then campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The president will defend policies responsible for “record job creation, the strongest economy in the world, higher wages and household prosperity, and lower drug and energy costs,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in a statement. LaBolt also contrasted 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 drew attention to Trump’s most provocative statements that evoked Adolf Hitler by declaring that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the US and lightheartedly suggesting that he would serve as dictator on his first day back in the White House.
Trump recently told a gala for black conservatives that he believed African Americans empathized with his four criminal charges. That drew renewed rebuke from Democrats across the country for comparing the personal legal battles to the historic injustices Black people have faced in the US.
Nevertheless, the former president has already defeated more than a dozen major Republican challengers and is now left with only Haley. She has maintained strong fundraising and won her first primary victory this weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democratic-led city with few registered Republicans. Trump mocked the fact that Haley had been crowned Queen of the Swamp.
We can do better than two octogenarian candidates for president, Haley said Monday at a rally in suburban Houston.
Trump’s victories, however dominant, have shown vulnerabilities with influential blocs of voters, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, as well as in areas with high concentrations of independents . . That includes Minnesota, a state Trump didn’t showcase during his otherwise stunning Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted for Haley on Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, he said, because the Republican Party needs a course correction. De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
Still, winning a Super Tuesday contest would be an upset for Haley, and a Trump victory would only increase the pressure on her to quit the race.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)