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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Gill wins in Texas’s 26th

ABC News projects that Brandon Gill will be the Republican nominee in Texas's 26th Congressional District. Because this district is solidly red, that means he is extremely likely to be the seat's next representative, succeeding the retiring Michael Burgess. Gill is a proud member of the MAGA wing of the party; he was endorsed by Trump and is also the son-in-law of conservative political commentator Dinesh D'Souza, who made the documentary "2000 Mules," which falsely alleges voter fraud in the 2020 election.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


More House projections

Here are a few more projections from our colleagues at the ABC News decision desk:

- In California's 40th District, a swing seat, Republican Rep. Young Kim will face off against Democrat Joe Kerr in November.

- In Alabama's 2nd District, Democrats Shomari Figures and Anthony Daniels will advance to an April 16 runoff, the winner of which will be favored to win this newly drawn seat in November.

- In North Carolina's 6th District, Republicans Addison McDowell and Mark Walker will advance to a May 14 runoff. The winner will be virtually guaranteed to be heading to Congress next year, as this district was recently redrawn to be safely Republican.

- In California's 20th District (Kevin McCarthy's old seat), Republican Vince Fong will be one of the candidates advancing to the November general election. His opponent is still TBD.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Final thought: Are women going to break more records? Too early to know

As my colleagues have already noted, the Republican primary is essentially over. But Haley's Vermont victory is the first time a Republican woman will win a state's presidential primary. (She also won the primary in D.C.) So, check a box for a broken record. But I had my eye on Republican and Democratic women in downballot races tonight, and overall it looks like Republican women without their party's or Trump's endorsement struggled to win in places where they have a good chance of winning in November. An exception is in North Carolina's 1st District, where wealthy business owner Laurie Buckhout is the projected winner. That seat will be tight contest in November. As of writing this, Democratic women are looking to be doing well in safely blue districts, like California's 12th and 29th, and Texas's 32nd. But tonight's results suggests the senators from California will both be men, after decades of female leadership in those seats. I'll continue to watch women's progress in both parties for 538, to identify trends and whether more records will be broken.

Meredith Conroy, 538 contributor


Final thought: Congress is the most interesting fight now

The presidential primaries are, for all intents and purposes, over. That means we can finally shift our focus to the primaries that are going to have the most impact on the outcome in November, in the House and Senate. Tonight we saw the first of those contests, and they did not disappoint. In Alabama, an appropriator, Rep. Jerry Carl, lost to a firebrand colleague, Barry Moore, in a member versus member primary. (Let's see what that does to morale in the GOP conference.) In California, Adam Schiff successfully engineered an uncompetitive general election against Republican Steve Garvey, freeing up tens of millions in small donor dollars for races elsewhere around the country. In North Carolina, a bevy of upcoming runoffs will help determine what shape the next House GOP conference takes. And in Texas, we're going to find out in the 23rd District just how much deviation from party orthodoxy is tolerated, when Tony Gonzales faces the music for his votes on a gun bill (negotiated by the state's own senior GOP senator!). Presidential season may be over, but the fun is just beginning.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections


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