WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are poised to move much closer to winning their party’s nominations on the biggest day of the primaries on Tuesday, setting up a historic rematch that many voters would rather not endure.
Super Tuesday elections are being held in sixteen states and one territory – from Alaska and California to Vermont and Virginia. Hundreds of delegates are at stake, the largest return for either side in a single day.
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 race that could serve as a barometer of crime politics.
But the most important races revolve around Biden and Trump. And unlike previous Super Tuesdays, both the Democratic and Republican battles are effectively sealed this year.
The two men have easily fended off challengers in the opening rounds of the campaign and are in full control of their bids – despite polls making it clear that voters do not want this year’s general election to be identical to 2020’s. 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.
“Both, in my opinion, have failed to unite this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Neither Trump nor Biden will be able to formally win their party’s nominations on Super Tuesday. The earliest either can become his party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden.
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 champion 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.
That contrasts, LaBolt continued, with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, which consists of “rewarding billionaires and corporations with tax breaks, taking away rights and freedoms, and undermining our democracy.”
Biden’s campaign drew extra attention to Trump’s most provocative statements on the campaign trail, such as when he invoked Adolf Hitler by suggesting immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the US and said he would try to serve as dictator on his first day back . at the White House.
Trump recently told a gala for black conservatives that he believed African Americans are empathizing with his four criminal charges, drawing a sharp rebuke from the Biden campaign and top Democrats across the country for comparing personal legal battles to the historical injustices that black people have faced in the US.
Nevertheless, Trump has already defeated more than a dozen major Republican challengers and is now down to just one: Nikki Haley, the former president’s former UN ambassador who was also twice elected governor of her home state of South Carolina.
Haley has crisscrossed the country, visiting at least one Super Tuesday state almost every day for more than a week, and has argued that her base of support — while much smaller than Trump’s — suggests the former president will lose to Biden.
“We can do better than two octogenarian candidates for president,” Haley said Monday at a rally in suburban Houston.
Haley 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 tried to turn that victory into a campaign-wide loss, mocking the fact that she had been “crowned queen of the swamp.”
Although Trump has dominated the early Republican primaries, his victories have shown vulnerabilities among some influential voter blocs, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. such as in some areas with high concentrations of independents.
Still, Haley winning one of Super Tuesday’s contests would provide an upset. And a Trump sweep would only increase the pressure on her to leave the race.
Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls indicating that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old run again. The president’s easy victory in Michigan last week was somewhat spoiled by a “non-committed” campaign organized by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Allies of the “uncommitted” vote are pushing similar protest votes elsewhere. One to watch is Minnesota, which has a significant population of Muslims, including in the Somali-American community, and liberals dissatisfied with Biden. Gov. Tim Walz, a Biden ally, told The Associated Press last week that he expected some “uncommitted” votes on Tuesday.
Although Biden is the oldest president in US history, his re-election campaign claims skeptics will emerge once it is clear he or Trump will be in office in November. Trump is 77 and faces his own questions about age, which have been exacerbated by blunders such as last weekend when he falsely suggested he would run against Barack Obama.
That has not shaken the confidence of Trump’s fervent supporters in him.
“Trump would eat him,” Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a weekend Trump rally in Virginia, said of a November rematch, adding that Biden “would look like a fool up there.”
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Associated Press writers Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.