USAnalysis

US election: Super Tuesday primary sweep confirms Donald Trump’s hold on Republican Party

Nikki Haley claims only Vermont as former US president dominates Republican primaries from east to west coasts

Super Tuesday: Former US president Donald Trump speaks during a Super Tuesday watch party at Mar-a-Lago. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Keith Duggan's face
Keith Duggan Washington Correspondent
Wed Mar 6 2024 - 16:35

The line in the dust could not be clearer as America moves closer to a November presidential election choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

As soon as the polls closed on the 15 states voting on Super Tuesday, the national map was swiftly transformed into a red sweep across the interior and from east to west, confirming Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.

He had claimed 11 states before midnight struck and his utter domination and reimagining of Abraham Lincoln’s party – the age of Trumpublicanism – was complete.

In the end, only Vermont, with its contrarian nature and rag-tag communities of Deadheads and nature-lovers and maple-syrup makers and indefatigable hippies, oh, and Democrats too (it’s an open primary), voted for Nikki Haley. The orange flare to denote that win on the national television maps looked all the lonelier when set against the blazing red of the states which are Trump homesteads.

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Former US president Donald Trump has swept to victory on Super Tuesday, setting up a rematch with incumbent Joe Biden in November's US election. Video: C-Span

On the Democratic side, president Joe Biden also swept the party votes as the incumbent candidate and will be expected to elaborate on what he is depicting as an elemental battle for democracy at his State of the Union address on Thursday evening.

US representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota ended his long-shot Democratic presidential bid on Wednesday. Phillips, a 55-year-old multimillionaire who is among the richest members of Congress, said he was endorsing Biden. He was the only elected Democrat to challenge Biden for the presidency.

But Tuesday was the night which made official the second coming of Donald Trump.

He took to the podium at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, after 10 o’clock and, although he declared himself delighted, his victory speech stayed true to his vision of America as a broken place. In tone, his message bordered on miserabilist and gave the crowd little opportunity to break into chants of “USA”, despite several gallant attempts.

[ Nikki Haley to end White House bid in wake of Trump’s Super Tuesday victories ]

For someone who demolished the political establishment with a reputation for brash entertainment, the former president has been stuck on favourite themes this year, like a DJ who has to play a different disco each night but always turns up with the same 10 LPs.

“A lot of experts have said the only reason the stock market is doing well is because our poll numbers are higher than ... Joe Biden’s. He is the worst president of the history of our country,” he told the crowd before riffing familiar notes on immigration and foreign policy and reminiscing about how he had stood up to the Taliban.

“In some ways, we’re a third world country – we’re a third world country at our borders,” he told them.

He did not mention Nikki Haley by name. The South Carolinian candidate watched the results come in at her campaign watch party in Charleston.

[ Sinn Féin’s battle to engage the Irish-American heart, mind and wallet when it comes to Irish reunification ]

Republican US presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaking at a rally at Tannahills in Fort Worth, Texas, USA, on Monday. Photograph: Adam Davis

An announcement came that she would not offer any remarks over the course of the evening. This seemed significant: in previous defeats, Haley has bounded to the microphone with unabashed zest, incensing Trump by beating him to the stage in the snows of New Hampshire. Instead, it fell to Republican grandees to make television appearances which were tantamount to gentle coaxing, inviting a runaway back into the family fold.

“I’m pretty confident – I have known her most of my political life – that she’s a team player,” senator Lindsey Graham said when asked if he thought she would honour her GOP pledge to endorse Trump.

“I think it is pretty clear that people have spoken. I voted for Trump, not against Nikki.”

Ralph Norman, the lone Republican from the House to endorse Haley, when asked if this marked the end of her political future within the party, replied: “Absolutely not.”

[ Trump’s unexpected moment of solidarity with border immigrants ]

“What Nikki showed on the campaign trail, she’s enthusiastic, she has a message, she communicates with voters. That’s not going to change. And the courage she showed, it was ... you know, she was not running for VP [vice-president], which a lot of people accused her of. She was running because she thought she could serve as the leader of the free world, and it just wasn’t her time, and it wasn’t meant to be.”

That was confirmed on Wednesday when it emerged that Haley was planning to announce her withdrawal from the race later in the day.

The gulf between Haley’s aspirations and the reality of Donald Trump’s control of the Republican heartland was presented as a panorama that must have been shocking for her campaign supporters – and donors – to behold. It would take a rare streak of defiance to keep on keeping on after this.

But even as Haley calls it quits, the deepening substance of her campaign meant that she has posed all sorts of relevant and troubling questions for both presidential aspirants and their parties.

Those question marks began to appear early in the evening, when the polls closed in Virginia at 7pm. Had you jumped into your car in downtown Washington and headed due west, in the grinding commuter traffic, the path would have taken you gradually towards the deepening true red of Trump country.

Arlington county, just across the Potomac river, is part of the old District of Columbia. Haley won the DC Republican primary at the weekend, a moral victory in an overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold where just a couple of thousand Republicans turned out to vote.

The demographics in the metropolitan areas of Arlington were aligned with Haley values. A CNN exit poll composed a picture of a voting group that identified as 72 per cent suburban. Virginia is an open primary and 11 per cent of respondents identified as Democrats. They had turned out to vote, whether for Haley or against Trump.

Keep driving through Arlington, and as the lights and traffic thinned out, you would move towards the rural counties and the heart of the country where the voting returns were unwaveringly loyal to Trump. .

But even as the national map confirmed the hypnotic grip Trump exercises on the Republican grassroots, Haley continued to serve as an advance warning scout of future trends in the presidential race. If nothing more becomes of her political career, her resilience and latter-day fearfulness of what a second Trump term would entail means she may be remembered as one of the very few Republican candidates who did not wilt in the ferocious glare of the uniquely Trumpian combination of populist charisma and vicious verbal assault. That alone may give her a lifeline in 2028.

And the votes she did gather made clear that for Republicans, Trump’s appeal cleaves dramatically among college town dwellers. North Carolina, which looks set to become a fascinating miniature battleground of the profile of the general election, contained a perfect illumination of this.

In Rockingham county, for instance, Trump took 80 per cent of the vote. It’s a county where 26 per cent have college degrees. In Wake county, Haley enjoyed 65 per cent of the votes: it’s a county where 64 per cent of voters have college degrees. Durham county went the same way.

The question mark hangs over where these Haley voters will look now the choice is between Trump and Biden. Both campaigns will be busy over the coming months trying to court them.

But all of that may just be a distraction for the commentarial and the statisticians. Vast swathes of the American electorate are devout in their belief that only a second Trump term will revive their hopes for America.

Her events showed no rallies planned in the coming days. Before dawn broke across all of America, the reports began to circulate. Haley was done. You can only outrun a landslide for so long.

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