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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Downballot, Trump’s endorsees are winning in Texas

As Nathaniel and I discussed earlier, dynamics in the Texas state legislative elections have been particularly contentious this year, with the governor and Trump endorsing at least eight challengers to Republican incumbents in the state House. As of now, seven of those challengers are currently leading their primaries, though a few look headed to a runoff. One challenger, Barry Wernick in the 108th, is trailing by just 2 points.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538


It’s ovah in Minnesota

ABC News projects that Biden will win the Minnesota Democratic primary, and Trump will win the Republican primary. Biden’s win is expected, but also salt in the wound for his highest-profile competitor, Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who gave up a safe seat in Congress and the potential for a strong statewide run in a few years to launch his no-shot challenge against Biden.

Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections


Trump projected to win Massachusetts

ABC News projects that Trump will win the Massachusetts primary, his 10th win of the evening. With 15 percent of the expected vote reporting, Trump is leading Haley in the Bay State 59 percent to 37 percent. Yet again, this is another state where Haley was hoping to do well: Massachusetts has a lot of college graduates, and it allows independents and Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. But with Trump’s win, the Haley campaign turns its lonely eyes to Vermont.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Trump opens up lead in Vermont

With 56 percent of the expected vote now reporting, Trump has opened up a bit of a lead against Haley in Vermont. He has half the vote, and Haley is just behind him with 47 percent. Still, that's closer than the two polls, had us expecting. There's still room for Haley to pull out a win, which she would need: all of the state's 17 primary delegates go to the winner. That is, unless they both end up with under 50 percent of the vote, in which case they split the delegates proportionally.

—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