Microphone in hand, Nikki Haley was delivering a well-rehearsed stump speech when a primal cry came from the audience. “He cannot win a general election!” yelled a man, referring to Donald Trump and the ex-president’s chance against Joe Biden. “It is madness!”
Haley supporters at a campaign rally in a tiny Washington hotel on Friday signaled their agreement. But they are in a distinct minority within the Republican party as the biggest day of this year’s primary election campaign approaches.
Fifteen states and one territory will vote in contests known as Super Tuesday, when more than a third of delegates will be assigned to July’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee. Past results and opinion polls suggest that, by Tuesday night, Trump will have in effect wrapped up the Republican nomination against Haley, his sole remaining challenger.
On the Democratic side, incumbent Biden has swept aside token challenges by Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help author Marianne Williamson and is cruising to the nomination. The lopsided contests and lack of suspense are making Super Tuesday, one of the most celebrated rituals of the American election season, look not so super this time.
Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “It never mattered less. I don’t know any political event that’s got more attention for being less relevant. The decision has been made. The choice is clear. You know who the two nominees are and 70% of Americans would rather it not be so.”
Trump is poised to take the latest giant stride in a dramatic political comeback. He was written off by many after his 2020 election defeat, the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and the barrage of 91 criminal charges against him. Yet he has seen off a dozen challengers and easily won the first eight Republican nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the US Virgin Islands, South Carolina, Michigan, Missouri and Idaho.
The former Republican president has done it despite – or perhaps because of – a campaign based on retribution against his enemies and the promise of a second term even more radically rightwing than his first. Trump’s scattergun rhetoric, promising to be a dictator on “day one” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, has been rewarded with primary win after primary win.
Charlie Sykes, a contributor and columnist for the MSNBC network, said: “We’ve learned once again that the Republican party just can’t quit Donald Trump, that there is no red line, that there’s no going back. Nikki Haley and earlier Chris Christie gave speeches that would have been well within the mainstream of the Republican party as recently as 2015 but now they sound like they’re being beamed in from another country.
“Part of the reason that so many people take crazy pills is you look at Donald Trump and he has become more extreme, more deranged and more unhinged and yet nothing seems to matter. His authoritarian agenda couldn’t be clearer and yet Republicans who once thought of themselves as the party of liberty and the constitutional order are just falling into line behind him.”
Still, there have also been warning signs for Trump. The 77-year-old has repeatedly won less convincingly than opinion polls suggested he would. In the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, the Associated Press’s AP VoteCast found that college graduates backed former South Carolina governor Haley over Trump. She has been running him close in the suburbs, a perennial weakness for the former president.
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Trump is supposed to win all these races, is supposed to be the dominant figure in the party. The fact that, depending on the state and the day, there’s still 20, 30, 40% Republicans who are saying no, I’m going to pass on this, and independent voters who are coming out to cast a vote against him, is not the unified-Republican-party theory of the case that there will be absolute fealty to him.
“I’m not saying that any of them in the race could have put together a sufficient coalition against him but, if you don’t go after him, you’ll never get it. If you don’t speak truth about him, you’ll never defeat him.”
Anti-Trump sentiment was palpable at Haley’s rally of more than a hundred people in Washington, the capital, an overwhelmingly Democratic city where there are only about 23,000 registered Republicans. The former South Carolina governor argued for a return to normality after the Trump and Biden years, which she asserted had emboldened foreign foes, run up trillions of dollars in debt and left the American dream in jeopardy.
Wearing a grey Nike tracksuit sweater with I Pick Nikki and I Voted stickers, Joe Neal, 28, said: “I’m not going to support a seditionist. I’m not going to support someone who supported terrorism, as far as I’m concerned. I certainly agree with some of the former president’s policies but he cannot get my vote this time around.”
Asked whether Haley is likely to drop out after Super Tuesday, Neal, an e-commerce business owner, added: “Typically, yes, but this is not a typical year. You’re running against someone who, quite frankly, could be in prison one day and that’s just the reality.”
Haley has taken in significant campaign money, including $12m last month, and vowed to fight on. But she has seen some of her financial support waver recently. The organisation Americans for Prosperity, backed by the Koch brothers, announced it would stop spending on her behalf after she lost her home state of South Carolina.
Donors could be tempted to pull the plug after Super Tuesday, where the map heavily favours Trump. Polls show him to be an overwhelming favourite in California and Texas, as well as in states such as Alabama, Maine and Minnesota. His campaign projects that he will win at least 773 delegates on the night and formally clinch the nomination a week or two later.
Biden, for his part, is assured of the Democratic nomination when party loyalists vote for delegates to August’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the 81-year-old also has plenty of political headaches. Polls show deep voter concerns about his age as well as rising prices and an influx of people crossing the southern border.
Some Democrats are unhappy with his steadfast support of Israel in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza. An organised attempt to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary to protest Biden’s handling of the war garnered more than 100,000 votes, a significant protest, although the 13% share was only slightly higher than that option got in the last primary under a Democratic president.
Last week, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Biden trailing Trump in seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin – when voters were asked who they would support in a hypothetical general election. On average, Trump was leading by 48% to 43%. On Saturday, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Biden was at its highest in his presidency, at 47%.
Luntz, who had a long track record of advising Republican campaigns before Trump seized control of the party, said: “With every passing week, Joe Biden gets weaker and weaker as more and more voters come to decide that he’s simply too darn old. And so you see this gap between Trump and Biden widening.
“The gap is widening because Biden is collapsing. With the economy getting stronger and conditions on the ground getting better, Joe Biden is still getting weaker. That’s a three-alarm fire in America. The lights are flashing, the people are screaming but Joe Biden doesn’t hear them.”
Super Tuesday is not only about the presidential election. Among the most notable down-ballot races is the one in California to succeed the late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein. Vying to replace her are Democratic representatives Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, a former baseball star.
Most pundits will be studying the results for clues about a presidential race that is sure to be close and decided in a handful of swing states.
Asked what he had learned from the primaries so far, Luntz said: “That Donald Trump has lost suburban women that used to vote Republican, that Joe Biden has lost Latinos and a fair number of union members that used to vote Democrat, that there is going to be some serious and significant shifting of certain demographic and geographic voters. And that this election is going to be the worst in modern history.”
