Super Tuesday primaries 2024: Trump and Biden dominate, Haley drops out

The race for Senate in Texas will surely be one of the most closely watched races of the year. There are nine candidates running in the Democratic primary to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, but the front-runner is Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player and civil rights attorney who has represented the Dallas area since 2019. Allred has raised the most funds (to the tune of $21 million) and attracted donations from party influencers. The biggest question tonight is whether Allred can pull more than 50 percent of the vote and avoid a May runoff.

There are also a handful of U.S. representatives in Texas with at least some danger of losing their seats tonight, as Jacob covered earlier. Keep your eyes on Houston Democrat Lizzie Fletcher in the 7th District, who is facing a challenger from the left in Pervez Agwan; Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee in the 18th District, whose run for Houston mayor last year destabilized her campaign against former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards; and Republican Tony Gonzales in the 23rd District, who is facing multiple challengers and may also end up in runoff territory.

And there are some open seats up for grabs, creating hotly contested primary races. In the 12th District around Fort Worth, it's the familiar GOP battle between results-focused conservatism of the old guard versus the firebrand populism of MAGA. State Rep. Craig Goldman represents the establishment candidate, while business owner John O'Shea fills the role of MAGA candidate. In the 26th District, two far-right candidates are leading a slate of 11 to fill the open seat in this deep-red stronghold: Brandon Gill, who heavily promoted his father-in-law, Dinesh D'Souza's, conspiracy-theory-laden film "2000 Mules" on his website, and Southlake Mayor John Huffman. And lastly, with Allred making a play for the Senate, his Dallas-area 32nd District is up for grabs. Ten Democrats are running in the primary, though two in particular seem to be leading the pack: state Rep. Julie Johnson and trauma surgeon Brian Williams.

If you're interested in reading more on these races, check out my full preview from last week. Otherwise, I'll have more on these races and other takeaways from Texas after polls begin to close there at 8 p.m. Eastern.

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538

While we don’t have data for every Super Tuesday state, in the ones we do, Haley’s favorability lags far behind Trump’s among Republican voters. In Texas, an early February poll from YouGov/The University of Texas shows GOP voters there have a particularly dim view of Haley; the survey shows Haley 4 percentage points underwater among Republicans, with a 36 percent favorability rating and a 40 percent unfavorability rating, while Trump is has a massive positive net approval rating of 71 percent (83 percent favorable and just 12 percent unfavorable).

While not quite as dismal as in Texas, Haley’s numbers in other Super Tuesday states lag far behind Trump’s. For example, a Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll from mid-February in North Carolina has Haley at net +18 percent favorability (52 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable) among registered Republicans, compared to net +64 percent favorability for Trump (81 percent favorable, 17 percent unfavorable). An early February poll in Maine from Pan Atlantic Research shows Haley at net favorability +15 percent favorable (50 to 35 percent), compared to Trump’s net +52 percent favorability rating (76 to 24 percent).

In Vermont, polls suggest Haley might perform a little better than in other states, but her favorability is underwater, according to an early January survey from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. That survey had Trump with a lower favorable rating than he enjoys in other states, net +20 points (57 to 37 percent), but Haley had a net favorability of -9 points among likely primary voters: 32 percent favorable and 41 percent unfavorable.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538

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Nikki Haley faces uphill battle in Super Tuesday showdown

ABC News political director Rick Klein has a look at where former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley could potentially put a dent in former President Donald Trump's lead.

ABCNews.com

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that ruled Trump ineligible for the state’s primary ballot on 14th Amendment grounds (i.e., that he had participated in insurrection). The court unanimously found that states don't have the power to disqualify federal candidates under the 14th Amendment. The upshot of the decision is that Trump is eligible to run for president in every state.

Despite the splashy headlines about yesterday’s decision, it really doesn't change anything about today’s presidential contest. Trump's name was already included on the ballots that Colorado voters are submitting today, after the Colorado court had stayed its own decision pending the federal appeal. And while some Democrats had hoped that the Supreme Court would rule Trump ineligible everywhere — thus abruptly ending his presidential campaign — that was never going to happen. The Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, and even the liberal justices seemed unpersuaded by oral arguments.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

As the Super Tuesday results come in, there will be a lot of attention to how they compare with the 2016 primaries. In early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump has tended to do better in the places where he did well eight years ago. But we should be careful not to overstate the continuity. While Trump was seen as a relatively moderate Republican back in 2016, he now anchors the conservative end of the political spectrum.

In January 2016, Diana Mutz and I asked a population-based panel of Americans 26 and older whom they supported in the GOP presidential primary. Back then, Trump's best group of GOP primary voters were actually those who called themselves "moderates," while Ted Cruz won respondents who said they were "extremely conservative." Later that year, we asked all respondents to place Trump on a 7-point ideology scale, where "1" meant "extremely liberal" and 7 meant "extremely conservative." Trump scored 5.0, placing him almost exactly at "slightly conservative."

But after Trump had been president for three years and had overseen major tax cuts and an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act — not to mention being the face of a growing contingent of MAGA-inspired conservatives — perceptions of him had changed. In January 2020, our panelists rated him a 5.6, meaning they saw him as closer to "conservative" than to "slightly conservative."

Other data reinforces the idea that perceptions of Trump continued to shift, and that he shed the perception of being a moderate. In April 2021, I teamed up with Hans Noel to ask political activists who was more conservative among pairs of prominent politicians. From those comparisons, we generated perceived ideology scores. By then, Trump was perceived by all respondents to be fairly far on the conservative end of the spectrum, with just ten GOP politicians to his right versus 43 to his left. (The Republicans who were perceived to be on his right are generally seen as Trump allies, such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.) It's noteworthy that at the time, Nikki Haley was ranked just two slots less conservative than Trump.

Noel and I replicated the analysis in November 2023 in a YouGov survey of American adults. Among Republican survey respondents, Ron DeSantis was thought to be the second most conservative figure, with only Ted Cruz viewed as more conservative. But Trump was also far on the conservative end of the spectrum, ranking fifth out of 23 Republicans on the list. It's no surprise that in that same survey, Trump's best group for the primary was respondents who called themselves "very conservative."

Haley, by contrast, had come to be seen as closer to the center of the GOP — she was viewed as more conservative than Mitch McConnell, Chris Christie and Kevin McCarthy, but also more liberal than fellow primary candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence, and Trump allies like Hawley and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Haley's best group in the November survey was self-described "moderates," although Trump still won that group with 51 percent compared to Haley's 18.

That reflects the fact that DeSantis and Haley cut somewhat different profiles among GOP primary voters. While Haley is the Trump challenger still in the race, DeSantis seems to have been the bigger threat to the conservative base that Trump has come to rely on. And with DeSantis out of the race, Trump has been able to consolidate the GOP's conservative wing, which has increasingly been defined by his politics since 2016.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor