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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Historically Republican Vermont

While we like to think of Vermont as the home of Ben & Jerry’s and Bernie Sanders, from a historical perspective, it’s actually among the most Republican states in American history. It voted for every Republican candidate for president from 1856 to 1988 (except for Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964), and former Sen. Pat Leahy was fond of noting that he was the only Democrat the state had ever sent to the Senate. So there’s something poetic about the state asserting itself in a GOP primary tonight.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections


Polls in Vermont did not expect the election to be this close

Polling of the Vermont Republican primary was pretty thin this year, with only one poll released in the last month from the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. That survey suggested a fairly easy win for Trump; he was ahead of Haley by 30 percentage points. In addition, 58 percent of likely GOP primary voters in the state said they would be dissatisfied or angry if Haley were to win the nomination, while just 29 percent said the same of Trump.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538


Trump's magic number

Remember, dear reader, the presidential primary is all about the delegates. So far Trump has 276 to Haley's 43. That total is so lopsided that the only real question left is when, not if, Trump will win. The next big primary day is March 12 — let's take a look at what Trump needs to do today in order to clinch the delegate majority of 1,215 on the 12th.

Here's the math: There are 199 delegates up for grabs in contests between March 8 and March 12. Assuming he wins all of those 199 delegates, he would need to win 1,215 - 199 = 1,016 by the time all Super Tuesday ballots are counted. As noted, he's already won 276 of those delegates, meaning he has to pick up 769 delegates more, out of the 865 delegates up for grabs tonight. That's about 89% — which is a little higher than the 87% of delegates he has won from states that have voted so far.

Trump could totally pull that off, in which case we would start calling him the "presumptive nominee" next Tuesday. Otherwise, he will have to wait until March 19, when there are 370 more delegates up for grabs.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538


Early results in Vermont are coming in and Haley might be doing all right there

If you feel like sitting on the edge of your seat, like we do, The New York Times Needle is back in action tonight and has Haley ever-so-slightly ahead in Vermont at the moment.

—Monica Potts, 538


Trump leads in primary polls in virtually every state

If the polls are right, there will be very little drama tonight in presidential races: Trump has massive leads over Haley in virtually every state. For instance, here's what our primary polling averages say in the six states with enough polling to calculate one:

Trump also leads by at least 42 percentage points in the few state-level polls we have this year from Alabama, Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma. His lead is smaller, though still substantial, in the most recent surveys of Utah (27 points) and Vermont (30 points). Unfortunately, we're flying blind in the last three states; we don't have any polls of Arkansas since last fall, or any polls of Alaska or Colorado, period.

But what if … the polls are wrong? Even in the states where we've calculated averages, there is precious little truly recent polling. The only polls of Super Tuesday states conducted entirely within the last month were four of California, two of Maine, one of Minnesota, two of North Carolina, one of Texas, one of Vermont and one of Virginia. That's not a lot of data to go off.

Plus, primary polls so far this year have overestimated Trump's margin over Haley. This isn't necessarily unusual; since 2000, presidential primary polls have had an average error of 9 points. But the fact that the direction of that error has been consistent so far is … interesting. We usually caution against trying to predict the direction of polling error in advance, but this could — could — indicate that pollsters' likely-voter models for the primary are too weighted toward the Trump wing of the GOP.

As Geoffrey and I wrote yesterday, there are certain states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont and Virginia — that seem demographically favorable for Haley. Despite what the polls say, I wouldn't be totally shocked if Haley pulled off a win in one of them. As noted, Colorado hasn't seen any polling this cycle, and Massachusetts hasn't seen any in a month. And while a poll gave Trump a 30-point lead in Vermont a few weeks back, the most recent poll of Virginia put Trump's lead over Haley at just 8 points among likely voters.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538