Joe Biden and Donald Trump sweep Super Tuesday races and move closer to November rematch – Chicago Tribune

President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were sweeping the rivalry from coast to coast. super tuesdayIt builds up a November rematch and increases pressure on the former president’s last major rival, Nikki Haley, to drop out of the Republican race.

Biden and Trump won Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts. Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Utah, Vermont and Iowa.

Haley’s strongest performance was in Vermont, where she was essentially tied with Trump in early results. But the former president also favored other states that might favor Haley, such as Virginia and Maine, which have large moderate voters like those who supported her in previous primaries.

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Not enough states will vote until later this month for Trump or Biden to officially become their party’s presumptive nominees. But the biggest day of the primary has made a rematch a near certainty. Both Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, continue to dominate their parties even though they face age-related questions and lack broad popularity among general voters.

The only contest in which both lost Tuesday was the Democratic caucus in American Samoa, a small U.S. territory in the South Pacific Ocean. Biden was defeated by previously unknown candidate Jason Palmer by 51 votes to 40.

Haley, who argued that both Biden and Trump were too old to return to the White House, was spending election night watching the results in the Charleston, South Carolina, area where she lives. The campaign website does not list any upcoming events. Still, aides insisted the mood at the watch party was “enthusiastic.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion was packed for a victory party that included appetizers like empanadas and baked brie. Those in attendance included staffers and supporters, including rapper Forgiato Blow and former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The crowd erupted when Fox News announced on screens around the ballroom that the former president had won the North Carolina GOP primary.

While the focus has mostly been on the presidential race, there have also been significant down-ballot contests. The governor’s race has taken shape in North Carolina, where Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face off in a state where both parties are fiercely contested ahead of November.

California voters were choosing candidates to run to fill Dianne Feinstein’s long-held Senate seat. And in Los Angeles, a progressive prosecutor tried to fend off an intense reelection challenge in a contest that could serve as a barometer of criminal politics.

The earliest date that Biden or Trump could become their party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden. But both are already signaling that they are looking forward to facing each other again.

“We’ve got to beat Biden; he’s the worst president in history,” Trump said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.”

Biden responded with a series of radio interviews aimed at boosting his support among Black voters who helped solidify his 2020 coalition.

“If we lose this election, you go back to Donald Trump,” Biden said on the “DeDe Sabah” program hosted by DeDe McGuire. “The way he spoke, the way he acted, the way he dealt with the African-American community, I think was disgraceful.”

Despite Biden and Trump’s dominance of their parties, polls make clear that large swaths of voters do not want this year’s general election to be the same as the 2020 race. A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that a majority of Americans think neither Biden nor Trump have the mental acuity needed for the job.

“In my opinion, they both failed to unite this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.

The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Instead of mixing states holding primary elections, Biden and Trump held rival events at the U.S.-Mexico border last week, each seeking leverage in an increasingly fraught immigration debate.

After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to return Trump to the primaries following attempts to ban him for his role in sparking the Capitol riot, Trump pointed to 91 criminal complaints against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.

“Fight your own fight,” Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.”

Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Thursday, then campaign in key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The former president still defeated more than a dozen Republican rivals and now faces only Haley, the former U.N. ambassador. He maintained strong fundraising and scored his first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democratic-run city with few registered Republicans. Trump quipped that Haley had been “crowned the queen of the swamp.”

“We can do better than two 80-year-old presidential candidates,” Haley said at a rally in the Houston suburbs on Monday.

Trump’s victories, though dominant, showed the vulnerabilities of influential voter blocs, 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 where independents are concentrated. . That includes Minnesota, a state where Trump was unable to follow up his remarkable Super Tuesday performance in 2016.

Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted for Haley in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, on Tuesday morning because the GOP “needs a course correction,” he said. De Penning, 40, said his choice was a vote of conscience and said he never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.

Still, Haley winning any Super Tuesday contest would be an upset, and Trump’s election would further increase the pressure on her to drop out of the race.

Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls showing that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, do not want to see the 81-year-old candidate run again. The president’s easy victory in Michigan last week was marred somewhat by a “decisive” campaign by activists who disapproved of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Allies of the “no-commitment” vote are calling for similar protest votes elsewhere, including Minnesota. The state has a significant Muslim population, including the Somali American community.

Aliza Hoover, a 29-year-old from Massachusetts, explained her “no preference” vote as principled opposition to Biden’s approach to Israel but said it didn’t accurately reflect how she would vote in November.

“I think the no-choice vote right now is an expression of making yourself a single-issue voter, and the fact that my tax dollars are financing a genocide right now makes me a single-issue voter,” Hoover said.

Biden is also the oldest president ever, and Republicans are key to any verbal slips he makes. Aides insist skeptical voters will emerge once it becomes clear that either Trump or Biden will win re-election in November. Trump is now the same age as Biden was in the 2020 campaign, and his recent failures have exacerbated questions about his own health; such as falsely suggesting that he would run against Barack Obama, who left the White House in 2017.

“I would love to see the next generation rise and take on leadership roles,” said Susan Steele, a 71-year-old Democrat who voted for Biden in Portland, Maine, on Tuesday.

Such concerns have not galvanized ardent Trump supporters.

“Trump will eat him up,” said Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a Trump rally in Virginia over the weekend, adding that Biden “will look like a fool out there.”