Super Tuesday is upon us.
In the Republican presidential race, Donald Trump is poised to widen his already substantial delegate lead over Nikki Haley. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is not facing a serious challenge within his party and could clinch the Democratic nomination soon.
Haley just notched her first victory of the campaign season by prevailing in the District of Columbia’s GOP primary — ensuring that the former president won’t become the first non-incumbent candidate to sweep a party’s nominating contests since Al Gore in 2000. But the former South Carolina governor, who has pledged to stay in the race through Super Tuesday, may soon be facing renewed calls to drop out.
Follow along for the latest news and analysis throughout the day from MSNBC.
What to know
- A total of 16 states held a primary or caucus on Super Tuesday: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. (While the Iowa Democratic Party’s caucus was entirely by mail, the party reported results Tuesday.)
- The results in those states will account for about 70% of the delegates a candidate needs to claim the title of “presumptive nominee.” Trump entered the day with 276 of the 1,215 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination, compared with 43 for Haley. (The Republican National Convention will be held in Milwaukee in mid-July, while Democrats will gather in Chicago for their convention a month later.)
- Other notable Super Tuesday races included California’s U.S. Senate primary, where several candidates were vying for the seat held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as well as gubernatorial primaries in North Carolina.
A Super Tuesday with zero suspense and a couple of surprises
There was no question that Biden and Trump would win their respective primaries of the day and win them big. Thus, we entered Super Tuesday with no suspense as to who would win overall. The only real question was whether their opponents would score any points on them.
And surprisingly, there were a couple of unexpected victories. Haley pulled out a Republican primary victory over Trump in Vermont, and some dude named Jason Palmer beat the president in American Samoa.
Steve Garvey, a former player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, came in second in the U.S. Senate primary in California, which means he kept U.S. Reps. Barbara Lee and Katie Porter out of a runoff against Rep. Adam Schiff, their colleague.
But those details aside, we all entered this Super Tuesday with the same sense of inevitability that we’ve had for months now. It was always going to be Biden and Trump. Whether that’s exciting or dreadful depends on the person. But everything up to this point has felt like a mere formality for the rematch we could all see coming.
Trump’s veep vision should be clearer now
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign, told NBC News that the former president’s list of potential vice presidential candidates has been “growing and getting longer” and said that Trump has been wowed by the number of “impressive prospects out there.”
But tonight’s results are a reminder that Trump’s list should really be narrowing. Trump has a clear weakness: reliably appealing to anybody who isn’t part of the MAGA base. Bafflingly, the part of his veep shortlist that he has described publicly is filled with vanquished MAGA ideologues, such as Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. Sure, these politicians flatter Trump and would be pliant — willing to do what Mike Pence wasn’t during the attempted insurrection.
But the reason Trump snagged Pence in the first place was because of the former Indiana governor’s ability to compensate for his own vulnerabilities with the GOP establishment and evangelical voters. The smart thing for Trump to do if he wants to win is to woo his remaining rival — Haley — or someone like her.
What happens when institutions cannot defend themselves
Rachel Maddow speaking on MSNBC moments ago:
There is this idea when you study countries that used to be democracies, that slid out of democracies and became authoritarian instead, that the institutions cannot defend themselves. We have set up our institutions so that their defense against authoritarian rule and anti-democratic tactics is shame and transparency, and people knowing the information so they can react accordingly. But if that is all we’ve got, then our institutions will not defend our democracy.
We’re in a situation right now where we can’t count on the existing structures to just do this on autopilot. There’s only one way out of this. You have to pick one. You have to pick Donald Trump or you have to pick Joe Biden. It means not only voting, but literally doing whatever you can to make one of those two candidates win. And if you’re not working for one of them, you are by default working for the other one.
These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Obama shuts down a bizarre GOP election conspiracy
One of the more outlandish GOP conspiracy theories swirling around Biden’s re-election bid has been the claim that a mystery Democrat could swoop in and replace him at the last minute.
To be clear, former President Barack Obama steadfastly supported his former vice president, and former first lady Michelle Obama has never shown any interest in attempting a dramatic intraparty coup.
Nevertheless, this theory has been pushed at various times by fringe MAGA characters like Roger Stone and, somewhat more incredibly, Sen. Ted Cruz.
“So here’s the scenario that I think is perhaps the most likely and most dangerous,” the Texas Republican said on his podcast in September. “In August of 2024, the Democrat kingmakers jettison Joe Biden and parachute in Michelle Obama.”
In a statement sent to NBC News this week, Michelle Obama again stated the obvious.
“As former First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,” said Crystal Carson, director of communications for her office. “Mrs. Obama supports President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ re-election campaign.”
Hopefully such speculation can finally be put to rest. But don’t count on it.
The question that only Haley’s donors can answer
Stephanie Ruhle speaking on MSNBC moments ago:
Haley has the money, so why leave the primary?
The question beyond “Where are Nikki Haley voters going to go?” is “Where are Nikki Haley donors going to go?” Because she has huge donors in her corner. And from my reporting, they’re not going anywhere. They are happy to give her money because she’s sort of this great hope for them, a George Bush Republican.
When she’s out, so are they. And they will begrudgingly vote for Joe Biden, but they’re not going to give him a big check. Or they will, secretly and not admit it, vote for Donald Trump. But you’re not going to see them writing big checks.
These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Lindsey Graham floats a bizarre 2024 playbook
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Sen. Lindsey Graham about “warning signs” for Trump’s general election prospects — his struggle with moderates, independents and college graduates.
The South Carolina Republican replied by saying Trump could win by making it “a policy contest” and taking the spotlight off his “personality problem.” At first blush, this seems funny because it implies that Trump is capable of some kind of pivot toward being a policy wonk, which is ludicrous.
But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Trump does represent many clear positions with his record and his rhetoric — he favors autocratic concentration of power, extreme nativism, nationalism, plutocracy, militance and social conservatism. Trump’s personality is polarizing, but at the end of the day the source of his disapproval is the extreme vision of American life that he applies his personality to trying to usher into existence.
Trump’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t discuss policy. It’s that his policies are extreme.
Marianne Williamson’s unsuspended campaign
Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson, who had suspended her campaign after pulling only 2% of the vote in the South Carolina primary, announced last week that she is back in the race. In a video posted on social media, she explained that she had dropped out “because I was losing the horse race, but something so much more important than the horse race is at stake here, and we must respond.”
Williamson is still losing the horse race, of course, but perhaps the 3% she got in Michigan made it seem like she wasn’t as far behind as she thought. The message of her revival video focuses largely on domestic economic issues, such as medical debt and high rent. But as my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem pointed out when it looked like Williamson had closed up shop, she has always been an imperfect messenger for progressive economic policies. Her “mystical belief in the capacity of the individual mind to will a new reality into existence underpin[s] her political rhetoric,” he wrote, “in a way that undercut her interest in progressive policies.”
Jan. 6 insurrectionist gets clobbered in Texas primary
On a night when it’s becoming clearer than ever that an aspiring authoritarian is going to secure his party’s nomination, it’s nice to see one of his minions lose badly.
NBC News projects that Ryan Zink — a Texas man who filmed himself saying during the Jan. 6 insurrection, “We knocked down the gates! We’re storming the Capitol! You can’t stop us!” — has lost the GOP primary in Texas’ 19th Congressional District to incumbent Jodey Arrington. Zink was projected to finish in fourth place.
Zink was convicted of felony and misdemeanor charges tied to his breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He pitched himself to voters as a “political prisoner” of the “D.C. gulag.”
Why Team Biden wants a starkly binary race
Chris Hayes speaking on MSNBC moments ago:
The Biden campaign wants a forced choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They don’t talk about Nikki Haley; she doesn’t exist in their world. They sure as hell aren’t gonna talk about anyone else who might be floating around the ballots in various states. To Team Biden, the key to re-creating the majority coalition they put together in 2020 is a starkly binary race. That's why it has to be a forced choice between two men; The two men that we keep putting up on our screens tonight. That is their calculation.
These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Schiff, Garvey will compete for rare open Senate seat in California
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who finished first in California’s U.S. Senate primary Tuesday, will face off against Republican Steve Garvey, a former Los Angeles Dodgers star, in the dramatic race to fill the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat. Feinstein served in the Senate for more than 30 years before passing away in September.
California has a top-two primary system, meaning the top two vote-getters overall advance to the general election, regardless of party. Garvey’s second-place finish eliminated Democratic Reps. Barbara Lee and Katie Porter from the runoff. Schiff’s first-place finish may speak to the power of his connections and his war chest. As my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted earlier this evening, Schiff, the pick of most of California’s Democratic establishment, had raised $31 million, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group tracking money in politics. That’s far more than was raised by Porter, Lee or Garvey.
The Republican Party loves to demonize California Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Feinstein. But Schiff already has plenty of experience being targeted by Republicans. In June, the GOP-controlled U.S. House censured Schiff for leading the first impeachment inquiry into Trump. He may get the last laugh.
Errin Haines, editor at large for The 19th, points out that Schiff and Garvey making the runoff will mean California, for the first time in three decades, won't have a woman representing the state in the U.S. Senate.
Not only has the state gone more than 30 years with at least one woman in the Senate, but as The 19th points out, it was the first state to simultaneously have two women senators.