Super Tuesday voters turn out to select parties’ presidential nominee

Former President Donald Trump is campaigning against his former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for a third of the Republican Party’s primary delegates as voters in 16 states and American Samoa select nominees for president. Incumbent President Joe Biden has few challengers.

(CN) — On paper, any presidential candidate who wins the Super Tuesday sweepstakes will be catapulted into the lead. But most political analysts foresee the two candidates who list “POTUS” on their resumes as further solidifying their frontrunner position following the nationwide primaries.

“There are enough delegates out there that if things changed dramatically, Nikki Haley could start reeling off wins and amass enough delegates,” said Jared McDonald, assistant professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “But we've had polling data for months and months and months that suggests Donald Trump is in an unassailable position.”

Neither candidate can secure a mathematical victory on Tuesday, but voters will award 854 Republican Party delegates and 1,420 Democratic Party delegates. Conservative states — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — will vote alongside liberal-leaning California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Virginia. Iowa is also holding its Democratic primary, months after its Republican primary.

Although U.S. territories do not get to vote in the general election, American Samoa awards 11 Democratic delegates through caucus on Tuesday. The American Samoa Republican Party caucuses Friday. Most states vote on predictable red-blue patterns, but territories often break the mold. In 2020, American Samoa awarded its Democratic delegates to billionaire Mike Bloomberg in a race otherwise dominated by Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Given fundraising, polls and other primary results, former President Donald Trump is well positioned to tower over former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in Tuesday’s coast-to-coast primary elections where a third of the nation's delegates are up for grabs.

Incumbent President Joe Biden is running unopposed in Tennessee and North Carolina, but voters in other states may choose Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips among other challengers. Voters in Colorado’s Democratic primary have nine candidates to choose from, including a “noncommitted delegate.”

Although originally printed on the ballot as a simple “none of the above” option, activists in Colorado are asking voters to choose the “noncommitted delegate” in protest against the U.S. supporting Israel’s siege on Gaza. Last month, Michigan voters awarded two delegates under their own uncommitted option, sending a warning to Biden from the tight swing state.

As a sitting president, Biden has unsurprisingly won every other Democratic delegate so far. As a former president, Trump is likewise dominating the Republican Party primary, partly due to charismatic branding, but also because GOP voters who believe he won against Biden in 2020 see him as an incumbent.

Haley remains in the race

Nikki Haley has proven to be a enduring complicating factor in Trump's third bid for the presidency.

So far, Trump has amassed 273 of the 1,215 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination. Although Haley took Washington, D.C.’s 19 delegates on Sunday, several polls continue to give Trump a 60-point lead.

In contrast to Trump’s intoxicating no-compromise style of politics, Haley’s message of governance acknowledges that passing policies often means compromising to reach a consensus. Haley's leadership-minded persona encompasses traits often valued by the Grand Old Party before Trump.

“Donald Trump has transformed what it means to be a conservative, what it means to be a strong Republican,” said political scientist McDonald, who studies compassion in politics. “The attraction of Trump is that if he wins, he's going to really, really upset liberals.”

Despite Trump’s advantages, Haley — also a former South Carolina governor — vowed to remain in the race, bringing together odd groups of voters from old guard conservatives to left-leaning independents who agree on picking “anyone but Trump.”

“Donald Trump is a quasi-incumbent and the leader of the establishment right now. It can be hard for politicians to buck the establishment, but Nikki isn’t running for them,” Brittany Yanick, a Haley spokesperson, told Courthouse News. “She is running for the 70% of Americans who don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch and want a return to normalcy.”

While early general election polls flip-flop between whether Trump or Biden holds a 2-point lead on the other, the same surveys give Haley an 18-point lead on Biden come November, threatening to blur the line so starkly drawn between the two dominant parties.

Of the campaigns, Trump has raised the most money from Super Tuesday states to date, to the tune of $58 million. Haley raised about a third of that from the same states, but outpaces Trump in Massachusetts and cuts close in North Carolina and Colorado.

“There are definitely people who liked Nikki Haley, but I think Trump is going to win easily,” said James Melcher, a political science professor at the University of Maine Farmington. “A lot of Trump's support is driven by people who like his leadership style.”

Biden won Maine in the 2020 general election with a 9-point lead on Trump, driven by the state’s narrow but populous First Congressional District along the coast. The northern inland Second District continues to find political strength in choosing Trump.

“Trump running in 2016 sharpened this divide that had been growing since roughly 2000,” Melchner said. “At the same time, in the First District’s relatively well-educated, old Yankee New England-style Republicans are very much turned off by Trump, and have been moving towards the Democrats.”

This will be the first primary where Maine allows unaffiliated voters to participate using the semi-open primary model also used in Colorado.

"Never Trump"

The Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state both disqualified Trump from the primary ballot earlier this year, claiming his actions on Jan. 6 amounted to engaging in insurrection as banned by a Civil War-era Constitutional amendment.

Both states still printed Trump’s name on the ballot in anticipation of review from the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed on Monday, finding states like Colorado lack the power to block Trump from the ballot.

“Back in 2016, the Never Trump movement was born here,” recalled Weston Imer, a Generation Z activist who entered politics at age 12 as co-chair of the Jefferson County Trump campaign west of Denver. At 20, he sits on the Republican National Committee's Youth Advisory Council and runs Prodigy Consulting Group.

Since Trump’s first election, Imer said “the party has completely shifted to be very pro-Trump in nature. Our new leadership is all America First conservative Trump supporters.”

This year, 41 million Gen Z Americans will be of voting age, with studies indicating the group is more politically active than previous generations.

“My generation is sick and tired of hearing about problems,” Imer said. “We want to know how are you going to lower our cost of groceries and make it so that we're able to spend money on the fun stuff, and not always worrying about having to survive.”

Gen Z is also giving rise to powerful young progressives, like Gabi Finlayson who dreams of a bluer Utah.

“Democrats and progressives really deserve better than just putting up yard signs and hoping for the best,” said Finlayson, a founding partner at Elevate Strategies in Salt Lake City.

While Utah decidedly supported Trump in 2020, the state remains home to a large portion of Mormons who oppose Trump on moral grounds. Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Deidre Henderson, endorsed Haley in January.

Although Finlayson expects Utah to back Trump on Tuesday, she is watching which counties draw the most Haley votes as an indicator of potential support for future progressive candidates.

“This presidential primary isn't going to tell us that much broadly about the general election, but I do think it will show us where we have opportunities for pickups with those people who are willing to look outside of the box,” Finlayson said.

Still, a large number of voters on both sides of the aisle are left shaking their heads, believing a Biden-Trump rematch spells trouble for America.

“I think the presidential primary is emblematic of what is so broken about our primary process in our country in that it forces people to have to choose between a red ballot or blue ballot,” said Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, a nonprofit advocating for open non-partisan primaries. “This presidential primary is not inspiring for the world's leading democracy.”

Troiano has a simple message to Americans: the primary election isn’t over until it’s over.

And so far, fewer than 2% of eligible voters have weighed in.

“Voters decide elections, not pollsters or pundits,” Troiano said. “There are candidates still in the race that voters have a choice of supporting or not.”

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Categories / Elections, National, Politics

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Super Tuesday voters turn out to select parties’ presidential nominee

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