The sleepy US presidential primary continued on, with more than a dozen states turning out to cast ballots on Super Tuesday.
President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump dominated yet again, all but ending the primary season, though some states still have to go to the polls. Voters have stayed home or tuned out, waiting until later in the year to show their enthusiasm.
Biden faced his biggest challenge so far from an ongoing protest vote against his stance on the Israel-Gaza war. Trump lost one state to Republican challenger Nikki Haley.
Sources from Haley’s campaign told the Wall Street Journal that she was preparing to drop out of the race and had scheduled a morning press conference.
Across the states, far-right candidates won in key primaries, setting up a race in North Carolina between a man who has made repeated antisemitic comments and a man who could be the state’s first Jewish governor.
Here’s what we learned from Super Tuesday.
The protest vote continues
Perhaps the biggest threat to Biden in the Democratic primary is coming from no one – or, rather, from a concerted effort by anti-war Democrats to issue a protest by urging voters to cast ballots for uncommitted or no preference options.
The ad hoc organizing came after Michigan’s uncommitted campaign pulled in more than 100,000 votes, a message to Biden that his base in the swing state was at risk. Since then, Vice-President Kamala Harris has called for an immediate, temporary ceasefire, which organizers say needs to be permanent, but is a sign the tactic is working.
“They’re feeling the pressure, and we want them to feel that pressure. We want them to know that this is unacceptable,” said Khalid Omar, a Minneapolis uncommitted voter who helped organize the movement there.
Several states saw sizable showings for uncommitted: at the time of writing late on Tuesday evening, in Minnesota, about 20% of voters chose “uncommitted”. Massachusetts saw about 9% of votes go to a “no preference” options. In North Carolina, about 12% of voters picked “no preference”.
Imam Hassan Jama, a Minneapolis community leader, voted for, campaigned for and endorsed Biden in 2020, but didn’t vote for him on Tuesday because he is disappointed at Biden’s inaction on a ceasefire in Gaza. He instead voted “uncommitted” and worked to get others to do the same.
“Hopefully we’ll send a strong message from Minnesota to White House,” he said. “And if they don’t listen, November is coming.”
While Biden, his allies and Democratic parties have sought to make the election solely about Trump v Biden, the Biden campaign acknowledged the movement on Tuesday, with a campaign spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, telling the New York Times that “the president hears the voters participating in the uncommitted campaigns. He shares their goal for an end to the violence and a just, lasting peace – and he’s working tirelessly to that end.”
Other states still waiting to vote are now organizing around uncommitted options, like Washington state, where the largest labor union endorsed the concept. Some states don’t have an uncommitted option or the ability to write in or leave blank.
The anti-war movement isn’t going away; the uncommitted drumbeat, as it morphs and grows, keeps the calls for a ceasefire in the headlines, forcing Biden to contend with his biggest liability among Democrats.
Biden v Trump is inevitable
Despite the hopes of many voters this election year, it’s going to be Trump and Biden redux in November – unless something non-electoral happens, like a prison sentence or health crisis.
The insurgent campaign to hold Biden accountable for Gaza is the only hurdle left for the president this primary season: the candidates who tried to oust the incumbent have not gained enough ground to credibly stay in the race.
Trump and Biden have been acting like it’s the general election already for months, aiming their campaigns at each other mostly rather than on primary contenders. And the contrasts between the two men feel much the same as 2020.
In his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago, Trump leaned into nativist comments again, calling the US-Mexico border “the worst invasion” and saying that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Biden, meanwhile, said Trump is “driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people” and is “determined to destroy our democracy, rip away fundamental freedoms like the ability for women to make their own healthcare decisions, and pass another round of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy.”
What will last candidates standing do
Some Super Tuesday states had a number of random names on their ballots, despite the lack of competition in both parties’ primaries. Those also-ran candidates with national campaigns need to decide soon whether they will stay in the running.
Marianne Williamson, the self-help author, previously suspended her campaign, then un-suspended it after a better-than-expected showing in Michigan, but has garnered usually low single digits.
Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman, lost his home state not only to Biden, but to the uncommitted campaign. Phillips has alluded to a forthcoming exit from the race, pointing out all the people he’s lost to on the campaign trail so far and saying people asking him to drop out could be nicer about it.
In the past month, Phillips had to lay off much of his staff after he unable to fundraise much because he is challenging a sitting president, he said on X in February. He did, however, win his first county, the rural Oklahoma Panhandle’s Cimarron county, winning 11 votes out of 21 on Tuesday.
On the right, Nikki Haley was the last non-Trump Republican standing. She won Vermont on Super Tuesday, Trump’s only loss that day and Haley’s second victory, after Washington DC. She previously lost her home state of South Carolina. She doesn’t have a path to the nomination, and her campaign reportedly said she was preparing to drop out.
Haley said many times that she was not interested in a third-party bid, though Phillips once floated the idea of running with Haley as a “unity ticket”.
Low turnout
Because of the lack of competition and lagging enthusiasm for Trump and Biden, voters don’t seem excited to head to the polls this primary season.
Turnout has fallen below past races, though in some states, uncommitted campaigns newly energized those voters who might have stayed home.
The Minnesota secretary of state, Steve Simon, told reporters on Tuesday that a few factors affect turnout.
“One is candidates that inspire strong feelings, and the other is perceptions of competitiveness,” he said. “I think it’s safe to say, I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, that we have a lot of number one, and not so much of number two.”
In California, officials were concerned about low turnout, with few voters saying they believed their vote would be important in this primary.
Only about 8% of California’s 22 million voters had returned their mail-in ballots a week before voting day, Politico reported. The numbers fall even more for younger voters between the ages of 18 and 34, a subset that typically boosts progressive candidates and priorities. Only 2% in that age group had turned in their ballots during that same time period.
But the lower turnout in the presidential primaries doesn’t tell us anything about what could happen in November’s general election. Presidential general elections bring the highest turnout of any US elections.
“Over the last many years, there has been virtually no connection, virtually none, between early in the year primary turnout and general election turnout,” Simon said.
Far-right machinations in the states
An explosive ruling by Alabama’s supreme court last month set off a chain of political reactions across the country, as Republicans fearing a backlash quickly uttered delicately worded statements praising the virtues of in vitro fertilization while attempting to defend their pro-life political credentials. Lawmakers in several states – including Alabama – began crafting legislation to protect IVF.
But Alabama’s Republican voters chose not to closely challenge the abortion politics of their state’s highest jurists on Tuesday. Their chosen successor to Tom Parker, Alabama’s retiring chief justice, is Sarah Stewart, an associate state supreme court justice who voted with the majority in its ruling last month declaring frozen embryos as “children” for purposes of legal protection.
In North Carolina, the lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, captured about two-thirds of the Republican primary vote on Tuesday to win the nomination for governor. If elected, he would be North Carolina’s first Black governor. But Robinson has made a litany of inflammatory public comments about race, gender, sexual orientation and religion, with repeated and particular attacks on Jews. He described the movie Black Panther as “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists” that was “only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets”.
He has compared gay people to “maggots” and – as of Tuesday evening – still has a 2014 Facebook post up quoting Hitler’s comments about having “pride in one’s own race”. His commentary elicits comparisons to EW Jackson in Virginia and more recently Herschel Walker in Georgia, notable as Black conservatives courting the far right with political extremism.
Robinson’s opponent in November will be Josh Stein, the North Carolina attorney general. The Democratic nominee would be North Carolina’s first Jewish governor.
