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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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


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