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.


0

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


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