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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Allred wins the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas

Back to regularly scheduled programming ... Former Tennessee Titans linebacker and current Congressman Colin Allred is projected by ABC News to win the Democratic primary for Senate in Texas.

Allred was the favorite to win the race tonight, but the bigger challenge will be trying to unseat former Canadian and current Senator Ted Cruz this fall. As Dan noted when Cruz locked down his primary earlier tonight, Democrats are hoping that they can finish what Beto O’Rourke started in 2018, when O'Rourke came within spitting distance of flipping Cruz’s Senate seat. If Democrats' are going to flip any Senate seats, this is likely their best shot, and is an important one if they hope to maintain their narrow majority in the upper chamber. So expect to see a lot of eyes and cash on this race in the months to come.

Kaleigh Rogers, 538


Rubio plus Kasich shows the way for Haley in Vermont

As The Washington Post's Lenny Bronner has pointed out, Haley tends to do better in the places where mainstream or moderate Republicans Rubio and Kasich did better in 2016. In Vermont, Trump won the state in 2016, but by just over two percentage points over Kasich. And together, Rubio and Kasich won 49.7 percent of the vote in 2016, meaning that Haley needs to just about equal their joint performance to win the state. So far, she's roughly doing that. Of the 120 towns with nearly all the expected vote in, Haley's share tops Rubio's plus Kasich's in 65 towns while being under it in another 55.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor


No polls for Palmer

Unfortunately, we’ve seen no polling at all this cycle that includes Palmer. So there’s no way to tell how he stacks up against Trump.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538


Is he even real?

Jason Palmer's (currently down) campaign website features a page called PalmerAI, where a deepfaked video of today's Democratic winner in American Samoa can answer any and all questions you might have about him or his campaign. Talk about uncanny valley.

—Irena Li, 538


Final thought: Is it time to finally pivot to the general?

As we discussed earlier, using presidential primary results to read the tea leaves of the general election seems to be a particularly fraught exercise. The dynamics (and electorates) of the two types of contests are wildly different, and several of my colleagues pointed out a variety of ways in which this type of analysis could go awry.

But now that Biden and Trump are both within weeks of officially securing their party nomination, I wonder if we'll start to see the conversation around the election turn. As Elliott noted earlier, Trump's speech tonight sounded more like a pivot to the general: Rather than mentioning Haley, he focused on Biden. And with the State of the Union on Thursday, Biden will also have an opportunity to try to focus the nation on his priorities for a potential second term. So it seems like both Trump and Biden have an opportunity to try to start communicating with the nation on their respective visions for the country.

The wildcard, for me, is whether voters are ready to pay attention. If they're not, then the messaging coming from the two candidates might start to turn into a low hum of background noise, essentially taking the edge off of any possible messaging wins as the campaigns beat the same drums for 8 straight months. If voters are ready to tune in, though, we may start to see polls shift in one direction or the other as campaigning begins in earnest.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538