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 about suburban Boston's politics

Nathaniel just mentioned Nikki Haley's strength in the well-educated, affluent communities around Boston. If you want to learn more about that group, its connection to the defense industry, its ambivalent views on racial integration, and its long-term movement into the Democratic coalition, check out historian Lily Geismer's book "Don't Blame Us".

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor


Trump pivots to the general

Trump is speaking now (right on schedule, for once!) and it's one of those "pivot to the general" speeches candidates give once they win the nomination. But it's also like he's playing his greatest hits on 1.5x speed: In the last five minutes, he has talked about immigration (saying migrants are coming in on airplanes), ISIS (he says he wiped them out in four weeks), inflation (chastising "Bidenomics") and energy generation, and he attacked Biden for his age (at one point claiming that the president cannot lift a beach chair which "weighs nine ounces").

One thing missing? Any mention of Haley. Remember, Trump is not technically the nominee until the convention says so, and he's not the presumptive nominee until he wins enough delegates. He is having a super Super Tuesday tonight, but he's not quite there ... yet.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538


Dean Phillips on dropout watch

Dean Phillips's tepid campaign may not last until the morning. Phillips has previously stated that he would drop out and endorse the likely Democratic nominee if his campaign wasn't viable after Super Tuesday. So far, his highest level of support tonight is in Oklahoma, where he's currently pulling 9 percent of the Democratic primary vote. That's closely followed by his home state of Minnesota, where he's winning a similar level of support. But at least he can say he won something today: tiny Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, where he currently leads Biden by five votes out of 21 total that were cast.

—Cooper Burton, 538


Town-by-town results in Massachusetts show Haley’s coalition

Trump is winning Massachusetts 61 percent to 36 percent, but as you can see in the map below, Haley is winning Boston and many of its well-to-do western suburbs like Concord, Wellesley and Weston. While these towns are now solidly Democratic, they are also home to a lot of the fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters who have supported moderate Republicans for governor like Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker. It’s basically the exact kind of well-educated voter that hates Trump but misses the old Republican Party, which Haley has become an avatar for.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


GOP primaries for the Texas state House could be a bloodbath

Sitting governors and attorneys general don't usually openly try to defeat incumbents of their own party, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are just built different, I guess. Today's Texas primaries are the culmination of two separate intraparty power struggles from the past year, in which Abbott and Paxton are actively trying to defeat Republicans who have defied them in the state legislature.

In May 2023, the Texas state House impeached Paxton on charges of bribery and abuse of office. He was later acquitted by the state Senate, but he has embarked on a revenge tour against those who supported his impeachment by endorsing primary challengers to 35 incumbent Republicans.

Meanwhile, Abbott suffered a massive political defeat last year when a group of mostly rural Republican legislators blocked his top priority, a school voucher program. In what the Houston Chronicle has called a "legacy-defining" campaign, Abbott has spent more than $4 million trying to oust 10 anti-voucher Republicans running for reelection.

Even Trump has gotten in on the act: He has endorsed at least eight primary challengers to sitting representatives, all of whom either voted against vouchers or voted to impeach Paxton (who is a close Trump ally).

If Paxton, Abbott and Trump are successful, the Republican caucus in the Texas state House will look very different — and further right — next year. Throughout the night, I'll be watching for how many incumbents they successfully topple.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538