PALM BEACH, Fla. — The rematch is on.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sailed through Super Tuesday primaries Tuesday, racking up enough delegates — in contests held in 16 states and American Samoa — to all but mathematically secure an encore of their 2020 election fight.
For more than a year, polls have shown Americans anticipating a sequel with the kind of eagerness typically reserved for a drug-free colonoscopy. But Republicans show little interest in stripping their standard from Trump’s hands, and Biden, like most modern incumbents, faces no serious competition for his party’s nod.
“The 2024 nominations may have unknowingly been locked up since November 2020,” Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist, said.
“With a former president and an incumbent president, both parties have dug in and are gearing up for a rematch which looks to be vicious, vindictive and possibly vile,” he said, noting that the winner would not be eligible to run in 2028. That “will ultimately lead to the oldest ever inaugurated president, who will serve out their lame duck term.”
Before Super Tuesday, Haley won only one primary contest — in Washington, D.C., which had one of Trump’s weakest showings in 2016. On Tuesday, Trump piled up wins in races across the country: California, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Maine, Alabama, Massachusetts, Colorado and Minnesota.
NBC News called Vermont for Haley, leaving the tally of states at 12 for Trump and one for her.
Addressing supporters at his Mar-a-Lago club here, Trump ignored Haley entirely as he laid out general election themes: blaming Biden for wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, inflation and illegal immigration.
“He’s the worst president in the history of our country,” Trump asserted. “Nov. 5 is going to go down as the single most important day in our history. … Right now our country is known as a joke.”
Biden chose not to speak publicly, releasing a statement that similarly pointed to the stakes of the November election.
“Tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice: Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?” Biden said in the statement.
He noted that wages are rising faster than inflation, took credit for the addition of 15 million jobs during his term and alluded to his lowering of prices for certain prescription drugs.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is at risk,” he said.
NBC News exit polls in Virginia and North Carolina showed Trump running up the score against Haley among self-identified conservatives, evangelicals and white voters who did not graduate from college — winning three-quarters or more of each of those groups in Virginia and more than 80 percent of them in North Carolina.
In what has become a familiar pattern, Haley fared better with self-identified moderates, who gave her 66 percent of their votes in Virginia and 62 percent in North Carolina. Her success with that smaller set of Republicans has raised questions about whether Trump can keep them in the GOP camp for the general election.
Neither Trump nor Biden can afford to lose many of their own party’s voters in November, and there are reasons for Democrats to worry about the president’s position even as Biden swept the primary map Tuesday with wins in California, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Maine, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Colorado and Minnesota. (The one contest he lost was the small caucus in American Samoa.)
Recent polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden in the national popular vote. But given Biden’s narrow electoral-vote margin in 2020 — he won by about 43,000 votes spread over three states, even though he led Trump by 4.5 percentage points in popular votes — some Democrats worry that his advantage has disappeared.
Their fears were underscored last week when Bloomberg News and the Morning Consult released a battery of swing state polls showing Trump ahead of Biden in each of the key battlegrounds that are expected to collectively determine the winner.
“Biden starts in a clear deficit in nearly every battleground state and nationally,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.
“Here is the brutal reality: The strategy Biden and Democrats have deployed to weaken Trump is simply not working, and it’s clear there needs to be real course correction both in terms of the message and the strategy,” Kofinis said. “Betting on a Trump implosion is not a strategy, and [Trump primary rival] Nikki Haley is going to find that out.”
