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


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