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:
Republican women of North Carolina
Earlier I wrote that although more Republican women are running, the GOP conference is still largely represented by men. North Carolina, where polls just closed, nicely illustrates some of the reasons that Republican women continue to trail Democratic women by such large margins, in Congress. North Carolina has low female representation in their state legislature (which is just 29 percent female), and that limits their recruitment from that pool. And in today's open primaries in safely Republican districts where the GOP primary will effectively decide the next representative, women aren't among the most competitive. As Kaleigh wrote earlier, in the 8th District outside Charlotte, the two GOP front runners are state Rep. John Bradford, and Baptist minister Mark Harris. And in the 10th District, the race is largely between state Rep. Grey Mills and Pat Harrigan, a gun manufacturer. There are several non-incumbent women running in the state today, but none of the groups we are watching that support Republican women (Winning for Women, VIEW-PAC, E-PAC or Maggie's List) have made endorsements.
—Meredith Conroy, 538 contributor
Trump wins Virginia
ABC News projects that Trump will win Virginia's Republican presidential primary. We'll have to wait to see how the final totals break down, but this isn't much of a surprise considering Trump had comfortably led most polling of the GOP race in the Old Dominion. Now, Virginia's more highly-educated population and Trump's weaker performance there in 2016 probably makes it one of Haley's better states tonight. Yet the fact the result there has already been projected less than a half hour after polls closed may foreshadow a Trump sweep tonight. Loudoun County's early returns demonstrate how Haley is coming up short: Sitting outside of Washington, D.C., in vote-rich northern Virginia, Loudoun is a Democratic-leaning and highly affluent county — the kind of place Haley has done better in. But she's still trailing Trump there by around 6 percentage points, 52 percent to 46 percent, with one-third of the expected vote reporting.
—Geoffrey Skelley, 538
What’s at stake in the Trump-Haley primary
While we wait for polls to close and results to come in, I'll muse about the bigger picture here. Depending on how things go, this might be the end of Haley's candidacy. But either way, we should think about what's at stake in the contest between her and Trump. Broadly speaking, she has increasingly presented herself as the Trump/MAGA alternative. In some ways, she's made this distinction clear, most recently by suggesting she might not stick with her pledge to support the party nominee, and denouncing his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the rest of her candidacy has been mostly about other stuff — how she'd be more competitive against Biden, and about giving voters a choice in the primary. On one of the main issues that set Trump apart from the rest of the GOP field in 2016, immigration, Haley has also been very conservative, signing one of the toughest state bills when she was governor of South Carolina and adopting Trump's language about toughness at the border. As in 2016, Trump seems poised to soundly defeat his primary rivals. But in terms of the real GOP alternatives to Trumpism, it's definitely not 2016 anymore.
—Julia Azari, 538 contributor
North Carolina Republicans aren’t worried about Trump’s indictments
The main concerns about the top candidates didn’t resonate with primary voters in North Carolina. Seventy-five percent of likely North Carolina Republican primary voters said that Trump’s criminal indictments were not a serious consideration for them, according to a February poll by Emerson College/The Hill, while 25 percent said the indictments raised “serious doubts” in their minds about voting for Trump. Democratic primary voters in the state were more worried about Biden’s age than Republican primary voters were about Trump’s indictments: 34 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said Biden’s age raised serious doubts about voting for him, while 66 percent said it was not a consideration.
—Mary Radcliffe, 538
More House projections
Here are a few more projections from our colleagues at the ABC News decision desk:
- In California's 40th District, a swing seat, Republican Rep. Young Kim will face off against Democrat Joe Kerr in November.
- In Alabama's 2nd District, Democrats Shomari Figures and Anthony Daniels will advance to an April 16 runoff, the winner of which will be favored to win this newly drawn seat in November.
- In North Carolina's 6th District, Republicans Addison McDowell and Mark Walker will advance to a May 14 runoff. The winner will be virtually guaranteed to be heading to Congress next year, as this district was recently redrawn to be safely Republican.
- In California's 20th District (Kevin McCarthy's old seat), Republican Vince Fong will be one of the candidates advancing to the November general election. His opponent is still TBD.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538