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

538 tracked how Trump and Haley did, plus key U.S. House and Senate races.

March 5 was Super Tuesday — the biggest election day of the year until the one in November! With former President Donald Trump projected to win 14 of the day's 15 GOP presidential nominating contests, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced Wednesday morning that she is suspending her campaign.

It was also the first downballot primary day of 2024, with important contests for Senate, House and governor in states like Alabama, California, North Carolina and Texas.

538 reporters, analysts and contributors broke down the election results as they came in with live updates, analysis and commentary. Read our full live blog below.


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That's a wrap!

Well, reader, we were determined to keep this live blog going until every Super Tuesday race had been resolved, but even we have our limits. In preparation for next week's primary live blog, we're wrapping this one up. Here's where things stand in all the races we're still tracking:

- With 99 percent of the expected vote reporting in California's 16th District, we're still not sure who will join Democrat Sam Liccardo in the general election. Democrat Evan Low and Democrat Joe Simitian both currently have 17 percent of the vote, and Low is just 63 votes ahead of Simitian.

- With 99 percent of the expected vote reporting in California's 45th District, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel is a safe bet to advance, but it's a close race for second. Democrats Derek Tran and Kim Nguyen-Penaloza are both at 16 percent, with Tran just 256 votes ahead.

- With 98 percent of the expected vote reporting in the Republican primary for North Carolina's 8th District, Mark Harris is at 30.4 percent, just above the 30 percent threshold he needs to avoid a runoff. The AP has gone ahead and called the primary for Harris, but ABC News has not yet reported whether Harris will win outright or be forced into a runoff.

- With 99 percent of the expected vote reporting in the Democratic primary for Texas's 32nd District, Julie Johnson is similarly hovering at 50.4 percent, which would just barely be enough to avoid a runoff. While the AP has called this race for Johnson, ABC News has not yet reported whether a runoff will be needed.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


New projections in California's 20th and 31st

We've got answers on two California House races that were still outstanding! In California's 20th District, ABC News reports that Republican Mike Boudreaux will make the general election, where he will face fellow Republican Vince Fong (who was already projected to advance). It's no surprise that no Democrats made the general election here, as this is the reddest seat in California. (It used to be represented by Kevin McCarthy.)

Similarly, in California's 31st District, ABC News reports that Republican Daniel Martinez will advance to the general election, joining Democrat Gil Cisneros (who was already projected to advance). That's good news for Cisneros; since this is a solidly blue seat, he will have no trouble in the general election against Martinez, whereas he would've faced a tougher campaign against a fellow Democrat.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


No runoff after all in North Carolina's 6th

Various news organizations (including ABC News) had projected that Republicans Addison McDowell and Mark Walker would advance to a runoff election in North Carolina's 6th District. However, that contest has now been called off. According to Spectrum News's Reuben Jones, Walker is taking a job with Trump's campaign and will not request a runoff after all. (In North Carolina, the second-place finisher has to request a runoff, it doesn't happen automatically.)

This maneuver is probably not a coincidence given that Trump endorsed McDowell in December. Regardless, it means that McDowell will be the GOP nominee here and very likely the district's next congressman, since Trump carried the 6th District by 16 points in 2020.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Some projections in California

The general-election candidates are set in one of this fall's most competitive House races. ABC News reports that in California's 22nd District, Republican Rep. David Valadao and Democrat Rudy Salas are projected to advance to the general election, setting up a rematch of the 2022 race that Valadao won by just 3 points.

In addition, ABC News reports that Democrat Sam Liccardo and Democrat Gil Cisernos are projected to make the general election in California's 16th and 31st districts, respectively. Their general-election opponents, however, are still TBD.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Alabama and the limits of Republican factionalism

Tonight, I'll be paying close attention to the results coming in from Alabama's GOP presidential primary.

That's not because there is much doubt about the outcome. Against stiffer competition in 2016, Trump carried every county in this Republican-dominated state, winning by 22 percentage points statewide. In 2024 primaries so far, Trump has tended to do well not only in places where he did well eight years ago, but also in places where Ted Cruz, the leading candidate among more conservative and evangelical voters, did well. Since Cruz finished second in Alabama in 2016, it's not a very promising state for Haley.

But even without much question about who's going to win statewide, Alabama serves as a bellwether for the state of today's Republican Party. It's the state with the highest population share of evangelical Protestants nationwide, a focal constituency of the contemporary GOP. Alabama has also been home to several competitive GOP primaries in recent years that can jointly tell us a lot about competition in the party today. Even after Trump's rise to the top of the party in 2016, precinct-level returns in Alabama's Senate primaries make clear that there aren't consistent pro-Trump and anti-Trump blocs going head-to-head in election after election. Instead, GOP candidates in recent Alabama primaries have put together somewhat idiosyncratic geographic coalitions.

Consider 2017, when appointed U.S. Senator Luther Strange, who had the backing of both Trump and the GOP establishment, competed against judge Roy Moore in a special election for the GOP's Senate nomination. Despite accusations of child sexual abuse, Moore prevailed over Strange in the primary (before losing to Democrat Doug Jones). New research suggests that in that primary, precinct-level support for Moore was higher in places where Trump and Ben Carson had done better in 2016, but the correlations are pretty modestly sized. In other words, knowing where Trump did better in 2016 really didn't have much predictive power in the next year. Still, Marco Rubio's 2016 vote share was negatively associated with Moore's, meaning those two candidates drew support from different places.

2020 may provide a clearer test: Trump's first supporter in the U.S. Senate and subsequent attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was running to take back his old seat, but Trump and Sessions had since fallen out and Trump instead endorsed the eventual winner, Tommy Tuberville. The places that had backed Trump in 2016 were somewhat less supportive of Sessions in 2020. Still, these correlations were pretty modest, and Trump's 2016 support also wasn't strongly correlated with backing either of Sessions's major opponents, Tuberville or Bradley Byrne.

And in the 2022 Republican Senate primary, Trump support was slightly negatively associated with 2022 support for both Rep. Mo Brooks, the conservative whom Trump unendorsed during the campaign, and eventual winner Katie Britt, who he did endorse. Trump's 2016 vote was only somewhat positively correlated with support for Mike Durant, a helicopter pilot who was shot down in Somalia as part of the battle depicted in "Black Hawk Down." But like 2017 and 2020, the 2022 Republican primary was not just a rerun of 2016.

Now, with Trump himself on the ballot, it's a different story. I expect that Trump will do very well in the parts of Alabama that he dominated in 2016 (read: most of the state), and that Haley's vote margins will be slightly stronger around Birmingham and Huntsville, just as Rubio did eight years ago. This was true in New Hampshire, for example, where Trump's 2016 precinct-level vote share was correlated with his 2024 vote share at 0.63, a strong correlation given the very different competition he faced in the two years. But, as a close look at Alabama primaries in recent years shows, Trump's 2016 supporters haven't necessarily formed a cohesive voting faction. During the Trump era, when Trump is not on the ballot himself, voters haven't always hewed closely to the divisions he has fostered.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor