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.
Latest headlines:
Historically Republican Vermont
While we like to think of Vermont as the home of Ben & Jerry’s and Bernie Sanders, from a historical perspective, it’s actually among the most Republican states in American history. It voted for every Republican candidate for president from 1856 to 1988 (except for Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964), and former Sen. Pat Leahy was fond of noting that he was the only Democrat the state had ever sent to the Senate. So there’s something poetic about the state asserting itself in a GOP primary tonight.
—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections
Polls in Vermont did not expect the election to be this close
Polling of the Vermont Republican primary was pretty thin this year, with only one poll released in the last month from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. That survey suggested a fairly easy win for Trump; he was ahead of Haley by 30 percentage points. In addition, 58 percent of likely GOP primary voters in the state said they would be dissatisfied or angry if Haley were to win the nomination, while just 29 percent said the same of Trump.
—Mary Radcliffe, 538
Trump's magic number
Remember, dear reader, the presidential primary is all about the delegates. So far Trump has 276 to Haley's 43. That total is so lopsided that the only real question left is when, not if, Trump will win. The next big primary day is March 12 — let's take a look at what Trump needs to do today in order to clinch the delegate majority of 1,215 on the 12th.
Here's the math: There are 199 delegates up for grabs in contests between March 8 and March 12. Assuming he wins all of those 199 delegates, he would need to win 1,215 - 199 = 1,016 by the time all Super Tuesday ballots are counted. As noted, he's already won 276 of those delegates, meaning he has to pick up 769 delegates more, out of the 865 delegates up for grabs tonight. That's about 89% — which is a little higher than the 87% of delegates he has won from states that have voted so far.
Trump could totally pull that off, in which case we would start calling him the "presumptive nominee" next Tuesday. Otherwise, he will have to wait until March 19, when there are 370 more delegates up for grabs.
—G. Elliott Morris, 538
Early results in Vermont are coming in and Haley might be doing all right there
If you feel like sitting on the edge of your seat, like we do, The New York Times Needle is back in action tonight and has Haley ever-so-slightly ahead in Vermont at the moment.
—Monica Potts, 538
Final thought: What will Haley do?
On the presidential side, tonight basically went as expected: Trump will win at least 12 out of 15 contests, while Haley has chalked up only one win so far — a narrow win in Vermont, which was demographically well suited for her as it is home to a lot of independent voters, a lot of college graduates and few evangelicals. Trump also now leads the delegate race 908 to 62, as of midnight.
The question is, what will Haley do now? She has said all along that she wanted to give the voters on Super Tuesday a chance to weigh in on the race, and they did so, roundly rejecting her. She's now so far behind in the delegate race that she can't credibly say she still has a path to the nomination. She has no more public events scheduled, so it seems quite possible that she will drop out of the race, but we haven't heard from her so far tonight. Might she sleep on it and announce her withdrawal from the race later on Wednesday? That's really the only suspense left in this presidential primary.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538