Trump the favourite as Haley makes last stand
Donald Trump is poised to continue his march to the GOP presidential nomination today, when 15 US states will vote to award more than a third of the party’s delegates and test how quickly Republicans are coalescing behind the former president.
Trump has decisively won all but one contest so far and is expected to make a clean sweep of “Super Tuesday”, a normally high-stakes moment in the primary calendar that the former president’s dominance has stripped of its suspense.
But despite Trump’s near-incumbent status in the race, a significant, if losing, percentage of voters has opted for another candidate in several contests – underscoring some voters’ reserva- tions and the potential general election challenges ahead. His last standing GOP challenger, Nikki Haley, has pointed to this trend as she has made a case for continuing her campaign.
In many ways, a rematch between US President Joe Biden and Trump is effectively under way, and observers and strategists have expressed mixed views about what the margins in the GOP contests portend for Trump in November.
Biden and his allies are ramping up criticism of Trump as a threat to democracy, abortion rights and other freedoms, while the ex-president has hammered Biden over immigration and the economy. Trump’s 91 criminal charges, which he has used as rallying cry in the primary, are also expected to factor into the campaign.
Trump’s team expected to lock down the nomination by March 19, advisers said. Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, has only committed to staying in the race until today, setting the stage for a potentially quick exit.
Recent polling shows that more than 90% of registered Republicans back Trump over Biden, who is struggling with low enthusiasm on the Democratic side, and cracks in the coalition that delivered him a narrow victory in 2020.
At the same time, the primaries have demonstrated Haley’s appeal to independents and university-educated voters as she lays out a forceful argument against Trump. Super Tuesday will provide more snapshots of who is in Trump’s camp, and who may need persuading in the months ahead.
The biggest prize up for grabs is California, where Trump has a good shot to take home all 169 delegates by winning more than 50% of the vote. The delegates formalise the pick by voting for their candidate at the Republican National Convention in July.
California Republicans used to award delegates to the victor of each congressional district, but Trump allies successfully pushed last year to adopt new rules they believed would help Trump quickly amass the 1215 delegates he needs nationally to secure the nomination. Many Super Tuesday states have winner-take-all provisions, but the details vary.
The states that vote account for some 874 delegates, and will test Trump and Haley’s strengths across very different electorates – from red stronghold Texas to battleground North Carolina to solid-blue Massachusetts, where the Republican population is more moderate.
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and the territory of American Samoa will also vote. North Dakota has been holding its Republican caucuses on the eve of Super Tuesday.
The Trump team says he could win the nomination as early as March 12 and will get there by March 19 even under their most generous modelling for Haley, which is based on her best showing so far, in New Hampshire. On Sunday, Trump swept GOP caucuses in Michigan, Missouri and Idaho.
Haley has stayed in the race as a vessel for dissatisfaction with a Trump-Biden matchup, arguing that more voters deserve an opportunity to support a GOP alternative.
She won 43% of the vote in New Hampshire and 40% in her home state of South Carolina, and has pointed to those performances as evidence of broad hesitations about Trump, even as he leads with almost every demographic in the GOP.
Her team has argued that Super Tuesday states with open primaries – where non-Republicans can vote – offer more favourable terrain.
Trump posted a wider lead over Haley last week in Michigan, where he won by 68% to Haley’s 27%. This suggested that his advantage in the primaries could grow as the race nationalised and moved to places where Haley did not campaign intensely, some political observers said.
Still, many Republicans have dismissed the Haley team’s argument that primary results are a “flashing warning sign for Trump in November”.
In the GOP race, Haley faces rising pressure to step aside. Trump warned after his New Hampshire victory that anyone who donated further to his rival would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp”.
It’s not clear how Haley will approach Trump in the long term.
Asked if she would keep criticising the GOP’s direction under Trump even if she dropped out, she said, “I don’t know”. Appearing on Meet the Press, Haley said she no longer felt bound by a pledge to support the eventual nominee, which the RNC required of all debate participants last year.
The United States Supreme Court yesterday overruled a state ban on Trump standing again for president.
America’s top court unanimously decided that Colorado could not disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which bars from office those who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”. It ruled that individual states did not have the power to make such a judgment.
Maine and Illinois had followed Colorado in banning Trump from their ballot papers but will be compelled to let him participate after the most historic election ruling since Bush v Gore in 2000, which gave the presidency to George W Bush.
– Washington Post, The Times