President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were sweeping the coast-to-coast contests on Super Tuesday, all but cementing a November rematch and increasing pressure on the former president’s last major rival, Nikki Haley, to leave the Republican race.
Biden and Trump had each won Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts. Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Utah, Vermont and Iowa. Haley won Vermont, while a previously unknown Democrat named Jason Palmer won a caucus in the tiny territory of American Samoa.
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump or Biden to formally become their parties’ presumptive nominees. But the primary’s biggest day made their rematch a near certainty. Both the 81-year-old Biden and the 77-year-old Trump continue to dominate their parties despite facing questions about age and neither having broad popularity across the general electorate.
Haley, who has argued both Biden and Trump are too old to return to the White House, was spending election night watching results in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, where she lives. Her campaign website doesn’t list any upcoming events. Still, her aides insisted that the mood at her watch party was “jubilant.”
Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, meanwhile, was packed for a victory party that featured hors d’oeuvres including empanadas and baked brie. The crowd erupted as Fox News, playing on screens around the ballroom, announced that the former president won North Carolina.
“They call it Super Tuesday for a reason,” Trump told a raucous crowd before attacking Biden over the southern border and his abrupt 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden didn’t give a speech but instead issued a statement warning that Tuesday’s results had left Americans with a clear choice and touting his own accomplishments after beating Trump.
“If Donald Trump returns to the White House, all of this progress is at risk,” Biden said. “He is driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution, not the American people.”
Despite Biden’s and Trump’s domination of their parties, polls make it clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds a majority of Americans don’t think either Biden or Trump has the necessary mental acuity for the job.
“Both of them failed, in my opinion, to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Rather than barnstorming the states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events last week along the U.S.-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to restore Trump to primary ballots following attempts to ban him for his role in helping spark the Capitol riot, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal counts against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.
“Fight your fight yourself,” Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.”
Biden delivers the State of the Union address Thursday, then will campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The former president has nonetheless already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now faces only Haley, his former U.N. ambassador. She has maintained strong fundraising and notched her first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans.
“We can do better than two 80-year-old candidates for president,” Haley said at a rally Monday in the Houston suburbs.
Trump’s victories, however dominating, have shown vulnerabilities with influential voter blocs, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as areas with high concentrations of independents. That includes Minnesota, a state Trump did not carry in his otherwise overwhelming Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls suggesting that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old running again.
He is the oldest president ever and Republicans key on any verbal slip. His aides insist that skeptical voters will come around once it is clear that either Trump or Biden will be elected again in November. Trump is now the same age Biden was during the 2020 campaign, and he has exacerbated questions about his own fitness with recent flubs, such as mistakenly suggesting he was running against Barack Obama.
“I would love to see the next generation move up and take leadership roles,” said Democrat Susan Steele, 71, who voted Tuesday for Biden in Portland, Maine.
Such concerns haven’t moved ardent Trump supporters.
“Trump would eat him up,” Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a weekend Trump rally in Virginia, adding that Biden “would look like a fool up there.”
Story by Will Weissert, Bill Barrow and Chris Megarian. Associated Press writers Steve LeBlanc, David Sharp, Gary D. Robertson, Sarah Rankin, Trisha Ahmed and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
