Voting under way in Super Tuesday primary contests
The polls are open and voting is under way in some states as millions head to the ballot box on this Super Tuesday, the largest day for voting for both Democrats and Republicans before the November presidential election.
People are already casting their ballots in person in eastern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and others, also further midwest in Minnesota and Iowa and polls will be opening soon in places such as Colorado, then further west later.
Voters involved today are in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.
This blog has now passed to the US from my colleague in London, Martin Belam, and we’ll be taking you through the day and evening as voting continues, then polls close and results start to come in.
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People are already casting their ballots in person in eastern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and others, also further midwest in Minnesota and Iowa and polls will be opening soon in places such as Colorado, then further west later.
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Voters involved today are in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.
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This blog has now passed to the US from my colleague in London, Martin Belam, and we’ll be taking you through the day and evening as voting continues, then polls close and results start to come in.
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Here, via AP, is an estimated timeline for tonight, so you can plan your evening. All times are EST …
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6pm EST (11pm GMT): Results expected in Iowa
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7pm: Polls close in Vermont and Virginia. Caucuses convene in Alaska (Republicans only)
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7:30pm: Polls close in North Carolina
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8pm: Polls close in Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Most polls close in Texas.
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8:30pm: Polls close in Arkansas
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9pm: Polls close in Colorado and Minnesota. Last polls close in Texas. Caucuses convene in Utah (Republicans only)
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10pm: Polls close in Utah (Democrats only)
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11pm: Polls close in California. Voting is expected to end in Utah (Republicans only)
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Midnight: Voting ends in Alaska (Republicans only)
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What are Nikki Haley’s prospects for today? Well, she has performed best in Democratic-leaning areas, as evidenced by her win in the Washington DC primary on Sunday, her first of the campaign. She has also benefited from independents and Democrats participating in Republican primaries, suggesting that her strongest performances could come in places with open primaries, which are not limited to participation by registered Republicans.
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Here’s what my colleague Joan E Greve had to say:
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Could this be Haley’s last stand? Most likely, yes. Even after losing to Trump by 20 points in her home state of South Carolina, Haley vowed to fight on to Super Tuesday, insisting that Republican voters deserved the opportunity to cast their ballots in the primary.
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“In the next 10 days, another 21 states and territories will speak,” Haley said after the South Carolina primary on 24 February. “They have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate. And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
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But Haley has been vague on her plans after Super Tuesday, and many election watchers expect her to soon call it quits. With only one win in Washington DC under her belt, Haley will have a hard time justifying the continuation of her candidacy.
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Joe Biden does not have any real competition for the Democratic nomination, as both of his main opponents – Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson – have failed to win any delegates so far, per the AP’s tracker.
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But Super Tuesday represents an opportunity for Biden to notch some decisive wins after his mixed performance in the Michigan primary last week. Biden won an impressive 81% of the vote in Michigan, but more than 100,000 of the state’s voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” after progressive organizers had urged Michiganders to do so as a means of protesting the war in Gaza. Many on the left have called on Biden to do more to bring about a ceasefire.
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In a statement issued last Tuesday after Michigan polls closed, Biden celebrated his win and notably did not include any specific mention of the “uncommitted” turnout, an omission that infuriated the progressive organizers of the campaign.
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“You’ve heard me say many times it’s never a good bet to bet against the United States of America,” Biden said in the statement. “This fight for our freedoms, for working families, and for Democracy is going to take all of us coming together. I know that we will.”
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Super Tuesday may give Biden the chance to show that the Democratic party is already coming together to defeat Trump in November.
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Donald Trump has continued his domination of the race to be the Republican nominee for president with an expected victory in Monday’s North Dakota Republican caucuses.
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As his campaign headed into Super Tuesday the former president will most likely stretch his lead over Nikki Haley by all 29 of North Dakota’s delegates. If he wins at least 60% of the vote he gets all of the delegates. If his vote is less than 60%, then the delegates will be split proportional to the respective votes for Trump and Haley.
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North Dakota Gov Doug Burgum was quoted by AP as telling Republicans in a virtual address to caucusgoers:
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I think we’re going to send a message that is going to be a kick-off to tomorrow, which is president Donald Trump is going to close this out, this is going to be the end of the trail, and we’re going to say we have a nominee, and let’s go after it, and beat Joe Biden in the fall.
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Two other candidates were on the ballot besides Trump and Haley. The other candidates were Florida businessman David Stuckenberg and Texas businessman and pastor Ryan Binkley, who recently ended his campaign.
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The Democratic Party holds its North Dakota primary on 30 March.
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Super Tuesday is usually one of the most hotly anticipated fixtures of the US electoral cycle, the point at which the race to be nominated for president usually has a big shake out as 16 states and one territory go to the polls or declare their results.
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It isn’t quite the same this year at all.
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For the Republicans, former president Donald Trump is so far ahead of his only rival, Nikki Haley, that the main focus is on whether she will even continue to campaign after tonight’s results come in, despite recently scoring her first primary victory in the District of Columbia.
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And for the incumbent president Joe Biden there are no serious challengers, but there is an opportunity to assess the extent to which Democratic party voters still have enthusiasm for the man they put into the White House to replace Trump just over three years ago.
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Here are the headlines …
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Yesterday North Dakota held its Republican presidential caucuses and Donald Trump is expected to win convincingly according to the AP. However, turnout was low.
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Joe Biden has announced a “strike force” to crack down on “unfair and illegal” prices. The new panel will target businesses “when they try to rip off Americans”, the Biden administration said.
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The US supreme court ruled on Monday that Donald Trump was wrongly removed from Colorado’s primary ballot last year.
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People incarcerated in state-run facilities in Texas and Florida are the most exposed to dangerous heat conditions being exacerbated by the climate crisis.
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It is Martin Belam with you for the next couple of hours. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
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Key events
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The US supreme court ruled on Monday that Donald Trump should appear on Colorado’s primary ballot, overturning a ruling by the state supreme court that said the former president could not run because he had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Trump was wrongly removed from Colorado’s primary ballot last year, the court’s unanimous decision found, in a novel interpretation of section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office.
The court wrote in an unsigned opinion:
We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.
Congress, the court said, had to enact the procedures for disqualification under Section 3. The court added:
State-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that the President … represent[s] all the voters in the Nation.
The decision was a victory for Trump, clearing the way for him to appear on the ballot in all 50 states.
While a lot of attention is on Super Tuesday voting, talks are still underway in Egypt for a potential temporary ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and the international criminal court in The Hague, Netherlands, has issued arrest warrants for two senior Russian military figures accused of being responsible for a missile campaign targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure between October 2022 and March 2023, two years into Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Our colleagues are following all of that news via stories and live blogs. Right now we have global live blogs running out of London on the latest situation in the Middle East, which you can follow here, and between Ukraine and Russia, here.
In the US, NBC now reports that strong comments US vice president Kamala Harris has made in the last 48 hours, calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and decrying the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza would have been even stronger if she’d had her way.
Harris met with Benny Gantz in Washington, DC, yesterday, a member of the Israeli war cabinet and a centrist rival of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in the US over Netanyahu’s objections.
I met with Benny Gantz of Israel today and reiterated our support for Israel’s right to defend itself. We discussed the need to get a hostage deal, increase the flow of aid into Gaza, and protect civilians. pic.twitter.com/IB6C6qZRFo
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) March 4, 2024
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I met with Benny Gantz of Israel today and reiterated our support for Israel’s right to defend itself. We discussed the need to get a hostage deal, increase the flow of aid into Gaza, and protect civilians. pic.twitter.com/IB6C6qZRFo
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) March 4, 2024
My colleague in Washington, Léonie Chao-Fong, will take the blog baton now and bring you the news as it happens over the coming hours. Our colleagues Chris Stein and Maanvi Singh will take over the evening’s Super Tuesday political climax.
Joe Biden is reportedly eager, and pushing behind the scenes of his re-election campaign, for a “much more aggressive approach” to the 2024 contest for the White House that revolves around going “for Donald Trump’s jugular,” political news site Axios reports this morning.
It’s a fascinating review of signals from the Biden camp and is based on a conviction from the US president that a great way to unsettle Trump, the Republican frontrunner to be his rival in November, is taunting him as “a loser”, the outlet says.
As a famously thin-skinned former president, Trump is believed by Biden, according to what he has reportedly told friends, to be “wobbly, both intellectually and emotionally, and will explode if Biden mercilessly gigs and goads him — ‘go haywire in public’,” as one adviser put it to Axios.
Apparently Biden is “looking for a fight” and his “instincts tell him to let it fly when warning about the consequences of Trump winning the presidency again. Biden told The New Yorker that Trump would refuse to admit losing, again, Axios reports.
Who can forget that in the 2020 campaign in which he won the White House, Biden weirdly called a woman on the campaign trail in New Hampshire a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier”?
His direct attacks on Trump and the hard right Make America Great Again (Maga) movement since last year have become much more pointed and effective, however.
Voting under way in Super Tuesday primary contests
The polls are open and voting is under way in some states as millions head to the ballot box on this Super Tuesday, the largest day for voting for both Democrats and Republicans before the November presidential election.
People are already casting their ballots in person in eastern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and others, also further midwest in Minnesota and Iowa and polls will be opening soon in places such as Colorado, then further west later.
Voters involved today are in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.
This blog has now passed to the US from my colleague in London, Martin Belam, and we’ll be taking you through the day and evening as voting continues, then polls close and results start to come in.
Martin Pengelly
Here is another excerpt from Martin Pengelly’s analysis piece about the key issues at stake in this November’s presidential election, which today’s Super Tuesday results will all but confirm will be a re-run of Trump v Biden.
Democrats are clear: they will focus on Republican attacks on abortion rights, from the Dobbs v Jackson supreme court ruling that struck down Roe v Wade to the mifepristone case, draconian bans in red states and candidates’ support for such bans.
For Democrats, it makes tactical sense: the threat to women’s reproductive rights is a rare issue on which the party polls very strongly and it has clearly fuelled a series of electoral wins, even in conservative states, since Dobbs. The recent Alabama IVF ruling, which said embryos should be legally treated as people, showed the potency of such tactics again: from Trump down, Republicans scrambled to deny they want to deny treatment used by millions to have the children they want.
Trump, however, clearly finds it hard not to boast about appointing three justices who voted to strike down Roe, and to entertain ideas about harsher abortion bans. Expect Biden and Democrats to hit and keep on hitting.
It isn’t just the presidential nomination on Super Tuesday ballot papers up and down the US today. One of the most keenly watched contests will be the primary for the US Senate seat in California vacated by Dianne Feinstein.
It has been quite an unusual race. The Democratic frontrunner is Rep Adam Schiff, who faces rivals from his party in the shape of Rep Barbara Lee of Oakland and Rep Katie Porter of Irvine. But also in the picture is former Los Angeles Dodgers player Steve Garvey for the Rpublicans.
Seema Mehta has been following the contest for the LA Times, and earlier this week she wrote:
Once Garvey entered the race, he did not mount a traditional campaign. He hasn’t held any big rallies or public meet-and-greets with voters around the state. He spent no money on television ads, never rented a campaign bus and declined to do endorsement interviews with California’s major newspapers.
In the final weekend before election day, the leading Democrats running for the Senate seat barnstormed the state, with Schiff holding seven public events, Lee attending four and Porter participating in two. As his Democratic opponents seized the last opportunity to woo voters, Garvey was at home in Palm Desert, visible to the public only through TV ads paid for by Schiff and his supporters and a brief Fox News interview.
And why is Schiff running attack ads against him? It may just be a cunning ruse. Mehta continues:
Schiff’s political ads portray Garvey both as a loyalist of former president Trump and the Democratic candidate’s greatest threat in the California Senate race. While those appear to be attacks on Garvey, they probably will increase his appeal to California Republicans and allow him to secure enough votes in the 5 March primary to advance to the fall election.
The two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary, regardless of their political party, will face off in November. A recent poll shows that, in a one-on-one matchup, Schiff would have a much easier time defeating Garvey than Porter, a fellow Democrat.
Over at CNN, Ronald Brownstein has an analysis piece which looks a little at the potential weakness of Donald Trump support away from his core base. Brownstein writes:
[Trump’s] performance so far reflects his success at transforming the Republican Party in his image. He’s reshaped the Republicans into a more blue-collar, populist and pugnacious party, focused more on his volatile blend of resentments against elites and cultural and racial change than the Ronald Reagan-era priorities of smaller government and active global leadership that former South Carolina Gov Nikki Haley has stressed.
But while the primaries have underscored Trump’s grip on the GOP, they have also demonstrated continued vulnerability for him in the areas where he has labored since he first announced his candidacy in 2015 – particularly among the white-collar suburban voters who mostly leaned toward the GOP before his emergence. The early 2024 nominating contests have shown that a substantial minority of Republican-leaning voters remain resistant to Trump’s vision.
Even while posting such convincing victories, he has struggled with college-educated voters and moderates. Trump has carried only about 40% of independent voters who participated in the three contests where exit or entrance polls of voters have been conducted.
Martin Pengelly
My colleague Martin Pengelly in Washington offers this analysis of the key issues that will decide the 2024 US presidential election, among them is the economy:
“It’s the economy, stupid.” So said the Democratic strategist James Carville, in 1992, as an adviser to Bill Clinton. Most Americans thought stewardship of the economy should change: Clinton beat an incumbent president, George HW Bush.
More than 30 years later, under Biden, the post-Covid recovery remains on track. Unemployment is low, stocks at all-time highs. That should bode well but the key question is whether enough Americans think the economy is strong under Biden, or think it is working for them, or think Trump was a safer pair of hands (forgetting the chaos of Covid). According to polling, many do prefer Trump. Cost-of-living concerns dominate such surveys. Inflation remains a worry. For Biden, Republican threats to social security and Medicare might help offset such worries. For Trump, whose base skews older, such threats must be downplayed – even though they are present in Republicans’ own transition planning.
Timeline for what to expect on Super Tuesday
Here, via AP, is an estimated timeline for tonight, so you can plan your evening. All times are EST …
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6pm EST (11pm GMT): Results expected in Iowa
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7pm: Polls close in Vermont and Virginia. Caucuses convene in Alaska (Republicans only)
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7:30pm: Polls close in North Carolina
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8pm: Polls close in Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Most polls close in Texas.
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8:30pm: Polls close in Arkansas
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9pm: Polls close in Colorado and Minnesota. Last polls close in Texas. Caucuses convene in Utah (Republicans only)
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10pm: Polls close in Utah (Democrats only)
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11pm: Polls close in California. Voting is expected to end in Utah (Republicans only)
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Midnight: Voting ends in Alaska (Republicans only)
Niall Stange at The Hill notes that in some ways, Nikki Haley’s win in Washington DC might prove a little counter-productive to her trying to attract Republican primary voters away from the lure of Donald Trump. It certainly gave the Trump campaign a new attack line against her. He wrote:
Haley notched her first victory Sunday, when she carried the District of Columbia primary. That victory was history-making, as her campaign noted it made her the first woman ever to win a Republican presidential primary.
But the DC win does not change the shape of the race, nor is it a harbinger of things to come. The Republican electorate in the District is highly unrepresentative of the grassroots of the party across the nation.
That point was seized upon by the Trump campaign. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Haley had been “crowned Queen of the Swamp by the lobbyists and DC insiders that want to protect the failed status quo.”
Will Super Tuesday mark the end of Nikki Haley’s campaign?
What are Nikki Haley’s prospects for today? Well, she has performed best in Democratic-leaning areas, as evidenced by her win in the Washington DC primary on Sunday, her first of the campaign. She has also benefited from independents and Democrats participating in Republican primaries, suggesting that her strongest performances could come in places with open primaries, which are not limited to participation by registered Republicans.
Here’s what my colleague Joan E Greve had to say:
Could this be Haley’s last stand? Most likely, yes. Even after losing to Trump by 20 points in her home state of South Carolina, Haley vowed to fight on to Super Tuesday, insisting that Republican voters deserved the opportunity to cast their ballots in the primary.
“In the next 10 days, another 21 states and territories will speak,” Haley said after the South Carolina primary on 24 February. “They have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate. And I have a duty to give them that choice.”
But Haley has been vague on her plans after Super Tuesday, and many election watchers expect her to soon call it quits. With only one win in Washington DC under her belt, Haley will have a hard time justifying the continuation of her candidacy.
What’s at stake for Joe Biden on Super Tuesday?
Joan E Greve
Joe Biden does not have any real competition for the Democratic nomination, as both of his main opponents – Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson – have failed to win any delegates so far, per the AP’s tracker.
But Super Tuesday represents an opportunity for Biden to notch some decisive wins after his mixed performance in the Michigan primary last week. Biden won an impressive 81% of the vote in Michigan, but more than 100,000 of the state’s voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” after progressive organizers had urged Michiganders to do so as a means of protesting the war in Gaza. Many on the left have called on Biden to do more to bring about a ceasefire.
In a statement issued last Tuesday after Michigan polls closed, Biden celebrated his win and notably did not include any specific mention of the “uncommitted” turnout, an omission that infuriated the progressive organizers of the campaign.
“You’ve heard me say many times it’s never a good bet to bet against the United States of America,” Biden said in the statement. “This fight for our freedoms, for working families, and for Democracy is going to take all of us coming together. I know that we will.”
Super Tuesday may give Biden the chance to show that the Democratic party is already coming together to defeat Trump in November.
Yesterday my colleague David Smith had a scene-setter for today, where he had spoken to Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster who had a long track record of advising Republican campaigns before Trump seized control of the party. Lunz told the Guardian:
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.
The gap [in polling between Trump and Biden] 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.
Here are some of the nuts and bolts of what is happening today. The states that are involved are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.
That spread from northern to southern states and from east to west coasts in the US mainland means results may take a while to come in.
AP notes that Super Tuesday has the largest delegate haul of any day in the primary calendar, representing more than one-third of the total delegates available in each party’s nomination process and more than 70% of the delegates needed to mathematically clinch either party’s nomination. But neither Trump nor Biden will be able to claim the title of “presumptive nominee” at the close of play.
The earliest that could happen is 12 March for Trump and 19 March for Biden. Trump would need to win about 90% of the nearly 1,100 delegates at stake until then in order to clinch the nomination that day. Biden would need to win about 77% of the nearly 2,300 delegates at stake before 19 March to ensure his nomination by that date.
And while we are waiting for those results to come in and delegates to be assigned, a lot of people in the US will be pondering the mental acuity of both Biden and Trump. A poll released Monday suggested 63% of Americans say they are not very or not at all confident in Biden’s mental capability, 57% say the same about Trump.
Trump wins the North Dakota Republican caucuses
Donald Trump has continued his domination of the race to be the Republican nominee for president with an expected victory in Monday’s North Dakota Republican caucuses.
As his campaign headed into Super Tuesday the former president will most likely stretch his lead over Nikki Haley by all 29 of North Dakota’s delegates. If he wins at least 60% of the vote he gets all of the delegates. If his vote is less than 60%, then the delegates will be split proportional to the respective votes for Trump and Haley.
North Dakota Gov Doug Burgum was quoted by AP as telling Republicans in a virtual address to caucusgoers:
I think we’re going to send a message that is going to be a kick-off to tomorrow, which is president Donald Trump is going to close this out, this is going to be the end of the trail, and we’re going to say we have a nominee, and let’s go after it, and beat Joe Biden in the fall.
Two other candidates were on the ballot besides Trump and Haley. The other candidates were Florida businessman David Stuckenberg and Texas businessman and pastor Ryan Binkley, who recently ended his campaign.
The Democratic Party holds its North Dakota primary on 30 March.
Welcome and opening summary …
Super Tuesday is usually one of the most hotly anticipated fixtures of the US electoral cycle, the point at which the race to be nominated for president usually has a big shake out as 16 states and one territory go to the polls or declare their results.
It isn’t quite the same this year at all.
For the Republicans, former president Donald Trump is so far ahead of his only rival, Nikki Haley, that the main focus is on whether she will even continue to campaign after tonight’s results come in, despite recently scoring her first primary victory in the District of Columbia.
And for the incumbent president Joe Biden there are no serious challengers, but there is an opportunity to assess the extent to which Democratic party voters still have enthusiasm for the man they put into the White House to replace Trump just over three years ago.
Here are the headlines …
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Yesterday North Dakota held its Republican presidential caucuses and Donald Trump is expected to win convincingly according to the AP. However, turnout was low.
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Joe Biden has announced a “strike force” to crack down on “unfair and illegal” prices. The new panel will target businesses “when they try to rip off Americans”, the Biden administration said.
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The US supreme court ruled on Monday that Donald Trump was wrongly removed from Colorado’s primary ballot last year.
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People incarcerated in state-run facilities in Texas and Florida are the most exposed to dangerous heat conditions being exacerbated by the climate crisis.
It is Martin Belam with you for the next couple of hours. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
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