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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Answer: Maybe undecideds aren’t all that undecided

I actually don't think polls are overestimating Trump by much, more that they're underestimating Haley. And I think it really comes down to undecided voters. Trump is a known quantity for pretty much everyone in America. So anyone who isn't sure if they're going to vote for him isn't unaware of his issues, but probably has some doubts about him. So my theory is that undecided voters skew, if not anti-Trump, at least Trump-skeptical and are disproportionately choosing Haley. You can see an inkling of that in the preliminary exit poll data: In Virginia, for example, voters that decided their vote choice earlier than this year went overwhelmingly for Trump (78 to 21 percent), but voters that made their decision later chose Haley (54 to 42 percent).

—Mary Radcliffe, 538


Answer: Maybe it's the people who might have voted in a Democratic primary?

Polling nowadays is incredibly hard. Seeing response rates of under 2 percent is all too common. So even very slight differences in how fired up people are to take polls can translate into meaningful differences between polls and results. Primary polling is especially hard because you can't use partisan identification to benchmark how reasonable the sample looks. That all said, in New Hampshire and in South Carolina, I wonder if Haley may have benefited from the lack of a competitive Democratic primary, and the fact that some who might have otherwise voted in a Democratic primary were able to vote for Haley.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor


Question: What's everyone's favorite theory ...

What's everyone's favorite theory about why polls have seemed to consistently overestimate Trump support? (I know this was discussed some on the podcast.)

—Julia Azari, 538 contributor


It's a big (but not super competitive) primary and nonpartisan election night in Arkansas

Tonight I'll also be watching my home state of Arkansas, where polls just closed. There hasn't been recent polling on the GOP presidential primary there, but Trump remains popular in the conservative state, which he won 62 percent of the state in the 2020 general election. His former press secretary is the governor, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and she endorsed him in the fall.

There's not much suspense downballot either. Rep. Steve Womack, who represents the northwest corner of the state—home to the University of Arkansas, Walmart, and other big businesses and booming towns—is fending off an unlikely challenger from his right and is the only Republican incumbent to face a challenger. That challenger, State Sen. Clint Penzo is against vaccines, the war in Ukraine, government spending and has criticized Womack's votes during the House speaker fight last fall. But Womack has represented the district for 13 years and all the advantages of incumbency.

On the Democratic side, all four candidates for the House are running uncontested.

Perhaps of a bit more interest — earlier, I wrote about the state Supreme Court races and how the outcomes there could result in a game of musical chairs leading the very conservative Sanders to make one or two appointments to the court.

—Monica Potts, 538


The history of Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday has over 40 years of history that are deeply entwined with a bunch of issues in the presidential nomination process. The term "Super Tuesday" was first used in 1980 but was promoted by Democrats in 1988 as a deliberate effort to give an advantage to more moderate candidates. This was a direct reaction to the idea that the party's 1984 nominee, Walter Mondale, had lost to Ronald Reagan because he was too liberal. This strategy didn't really work out, though, and Democrats ended up nominating another northern liberal, Michael Dukakis.

In other words, this early attempt at a Super Tuesday brought some of the disadvantages of a regional primary, reducing the amount of attention on individual states and pressuring states to move their primaries earlier without really strengthening the influence of the region. Another drawback was that, by trying to enhance Southern influence by holding contests early, Super Tuesday also contributed to the "front-loading" problem", or the issue of having too many delegates selected at the beginning of the primary calendar.

Over time, Super Tuesday has taken on other significance as an important turning point in the race. As party politics scholar Caitlin Jewitt noted, in 2016, everyone thought that Sen. Ted Cruz needed to do well on Super Tuesday, which was heavily concentrated in Southern states where he needed to rack up wins — and when that didn't happen, it was a significant blow to his candidacy. For Biden in 2020, Super Tuesday marked the point when the party consolidated behind him. And in 2008, Super Tuesday made it clear that the Democratic nomination was a real race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as neither one scored a decisive victory.

It's hard to know exactly how this will play out in 2024. Republicans don't have the same ideological history with the big primary day as Democrats do. But the potential for a turning point in the race is there: Because so many delegates are at stake today, unless Haley wins a significant share of them, it may not make sense for her to stay in the race after tonight.

—Julia Azari, 538 contributor