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 2024 weirdness: The post-14th Amendment primary

Yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected the legal arguments claiming that Trump could be disqualified from running for president in 2024 because of his connection to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that anyone who held a public or constitutional office and has engaged in insurrection is ineligible to hold office in the future, unless Congress passes a law stating otherwise. Section 5 says that Congress can also pass laws to enforce any of the provisions in the amendment. Lawsuits in several states came forward to disqualify Trump on these grounds.

But until recently, very few people had given much thought to this part of the 14th amendment since the years immediately following the Civil War. Legal scholars brought up a couple of ambiguities — did it apply to the presidency, since a number of offices are named, but not the president? Do we have an agreed upon definition of what counts as participating in an insurrection and whether Trump did that in 2021? (Spoiler alert: No.)

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state of Colorado could not disqualify Trump, though there were disagreements about how far to take that ruling. A majority held that Congress would need to pass a law in order to enforce Section 3. Though the unanimity of the ruling papered over some of the partisan politics, the timing was impossible to separate from political considerations, since it came just in time for today’s big round of contests.

—Julia Azari, 538 contributor


North Carolina’s state House speaker is probably going to Congress

ABC News can project that Tim Moore has won the GOP primary for North Carolina’s 14th District. Moore is the speaker of the state House and played a role in redrawing North Carolina’s congressional map this cycle to give Republicans three new safe seats — including one that included Moore’s home base. Unsurprisingly, he jumped into the race and faced only nominal opposition in the primary, and he should easily win the general election as well in this Trump +16 district.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Some updates from North Carolina

Some of those races to watch in North Carolina are still cooking, and I have a hunch we may end up in runoff territory for a couple. In the 1st District's GOP primary, Laurie Buckhout is edging ahead of Sandy Smith by 4 percentage points, with 34 percent of the votes in.

In the 6th District Republican primary, it's an incredibly close three-way tie right now between Trump-endorsed political newbie Addison McDowell, former Green Beret Christian Castelli, and former Rep. Mark Walker, who represented the district from 2015-2021 before making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. Bo Hines, a former wide receiver for North Carolina State University who ran unsuccessfully in 2022, is trailing the other three. This race will determine the winner in November — there are no Democrats bothering to run in the 6th, since it was redrawn to be much redder.

And in the deep-red 8th District outside Charlotte, redemption-seeking former nominee Mark Harris, whose 2018 congressional win was thrown out due to allegations of ballot fraud, is just barely leading Allan Baucom, a farmer and former chairman of the Union County Board of Commissioners. State Rep. John Bradford, who has poured $1.3 million of his own money into his campaign, is trailing with 81 percent of votes in.

Remember that in North Carolina, if no candidate gets 30 percent or more of the vote today, races will go to a two-candidate runoff in May.

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538


Speaking of Trump endorsements …

The former president's scorecard for endorsees is looking pretty good at the moment. Out of six candidates whom Trump endorsed, three have won their primaries (Mark Robinson for North Carolina Governor, Mayra Flores for Texas's 34th District and Tim Moore in North Carolina's 14th District) and two are leading (McDowell, who I just mentioned, and Brandon Gill in Texas's 26th District). We'll have to wait for the polls to close in California to see if Trump is heading for a perfect score.

Kaleigh Rogers, 538


Haley calls on Trump to 'earn' Republicans' votes

Haley took the stage in a bright red dress and in front of a row of American flags just after 10 a.m. from South Carolina, and announced she was suspending her presidential campaign. She began with a retrospective of the start of her campaign, and reiterated her conservative principles, including a low national debt, a small federal government and the need to promote democracy worldwide by standing by America's allies. With that, the final Trump challenger is out of the race, and Trump is the presumptive nominee, a fact Haley acknowledged.

Like most major candidates who ran for the Republican nomination, other than Trump, Haley had previously signed the RNC's pledge to support the eventual nominee, but she's distanced herself from that pledge a bit recently. Haley didn't endorse Trump this morning, but she did congratulate him, while slightly criticizing the way that he's run his campaign. "We must turn away from the darkness of hatred and division," she said. She went on to say that Trump needed to bring people into his cause, saying, "It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the vote of those in our party and beyond it." Haley has noted in previous speeches that she's captured a sizable portion of the vote in some states, even winning Washington, D.C., and Vermont, signaling that some Republican voters are dissatisfied with the former president as a choice for the future.

In the end, as Meredith noted, she made a somewhat rare reference to the historic nature of her campaign. She's the first Republican woman win any state's nominating contest, and she noted that her mother, a first-generation immigrant, had gotten to vote for her for president in South Carolina. She directed her final lines, quoting from the Book of Joshua, to women and girls who had watched her campaign.

—Monica Potts, 538