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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More runoffs projected in Texas, North Carolina

Catching up on some ABC News race projections that we missed earlier:

- In the Republican primary for North Carolina's 13th District, ABC News projects that Kelly Daughtry and Brad Knott will advance to a May 14 runoff. This is currently a Democratic-held seat, but the GOP legislature redrew it to be safely Republican, so whoever wins the runoff should be a shoo-in in November.

- In the Republican primary for Texas's 12th District, ABC News projects that Craig Goldman and John O'Shea will advance to a May 28 runoff. This is a solidly red open seat currently represented by retiring Rep. Kay Granger.

- And a bit of a surprise in the Republican primary for Texas's 23rd District: incumbent Rep. Tony Gonzales garnered just 45 percent of the vote, forcing him into a runoff with second-place finisher Brandon Herrera. Gonzales was censured by the Texas GOP last year for supporting bipartisan gun legislation in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, which is in his district. Clearly, the GOP base is still not happy with him.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Several incumbents ousted in the Texas state House

As we explained yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump all set out to defeat several incumbent Republicans in the Texas state House yesterday (albeit for different reasons). The Associated Press has now projected winners in most of those races, and here's how they turned out: In total, at least eight Republican incumbents lost their primaries after being targeted by one of those three men. Another seven, including Speaker Dade Phelan, were forced into runoffs.

Abbott's muscle looks like it was the most effective: Five of the 10 incumbents he targeted (over their opposition to his school-voucher plan) lost, and another three went to runoffs. Trump also did OK: Two of the eight incumbents he targeted lost, and three more went to runoffs. Paxton didn't have as high of a success rate: Only seven of the 35 incumbents he targeted lost, although seven more were forced into runoffs. That's maybe not too surprising, though, since unlike Abbott, Paxton didn't put a ton of money where his mouth was.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Dean Phillips suspends his campaign, endorses Biden

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips ended his campaign for president today and endorsed Biden's reelection campaign. Phillips got into the race last fall, citing Democratic worries about Biden's age and ability to beat Trump. But his campaign never took off, even in New Hampshire, where he focused much of his efforts because Biden wasn't on the ballot due to the state's primary having violated the national Democrats' new calendar rules. Phillips won 20 percent of the New Hampshire vote, but he didn't clear 10 percent in any other state where he got on the ballot. Yesterday, he earned 8 percent in his home state of Minnesota and 9 percent in Oklahoma, his best showings otherwise.

Although some Democrats share Phillips's concerns about Biden, Phillips predictably struggled because the incumbent president remains relatively well-liked by those in his party. Phillips was an unusual primary challenger in that he didn't have sizable ideological disagreements with Biden that stoked his run — the moderate congressman was not from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, for instance. And Phillips's overall performance reflects the lack of appetite for a center-left alternative to Biden — who hails from that part of the party — or at least one who didn't already have a sizable standing. Rather, the intraparty dissatisfaction with Biden has been felt more on the left, which has been especially critical of Biden's handling of the Israel-Gaza situation. (See: the "Uncommitted" protest movement getting more votes than Phillips in his home state.) Tellingly, Marianne Williamson's minor left-wing campaign has actually won more votes than Phillips in 10 of the 15 primaries they both participated in.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538


All incumbent Republicans lose in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals primaries

As Nathaniel mentioned yesterday, in 2022, eight Republican judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the attorney general cannot prosecute election-related cases without the participation or permission of a local prosecutor, a decision that upset Attorney General Paxton, Trump, and Gov. Abbott. Last night, three of those incumbents were up for reelection, and all three faced primary challengers endorsed by Paxton, Trump and Abbott. According to the Associated Press, with over 95 percent of the expected vote reported, all three appear to have lost to their primary challengers: Presiding Judge Sharon Keller is losing 37 percent to 63 percent to appellate lawyer David Schenck, Judge Barbara Parker Hervey is losing 34 to 66 percent to former Assistant District Attorney and businesswoman Gina Parker, and Judge Michelle Slaughter is losing 46 to 54 percent to criminal lawyer Lee Finley.

—Mary Radcliffe, 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