ABC News can now project that Trump will win the Colorado primary. With almost half the expected vote reporting already, Trump has 60 percent to Haley's 36 percent. It's Trump's eighth win of the evening already, and this one is particularly rough for Haley, as this was one of the few states where she had the best shot at an upset win.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Polls have now closed in Minnesota, which was a sleeper battleground in the 2016 general election, but tends to support Democrats. There are a greater-than-average number of college graduates in the state, which should be good for Haley, but there's also a sizable white working class population, which, if you're reading this live blog, you probably already know, is good news for Trump.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

In one of the least surprising developments of the night, ABC News projects that Trump will win Alabama. Only 5 percent of the expected vote has reported there, but Trump leads Haley by a punishing 69-point margin, 83 percent to 14 percent. We expected Alabama to be one of Trump's strongest states, and that looks to be the case.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

Going into tonight, I thought that Colorado could be a dark horse state for Haley. There wasn't a single poll of the race there, and the state's highly educated demographics seemed like a good fit for her.

Well, so far, it ain't happening. With 28 percent of the expected vote reporting, Trump is taking 57 percent of the vote there, while Haley has just 40 percent.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

As the Super Tuesday results come in, there will be a lot of attention to how they compare with the 2016 primaries. In early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump has tended to do better in the places where he did well eight years ago. But we should be careful not to overstate the continuity. While Trump was seen as a relatively moderate Republican back in 2016, he now anchors the conservative end of the political spectrum.

In January 2016, Diana Mutz and I asked a population-based panel of Americans 26 and older whom they supported in the GOP presidential primary. Back then, Trump's best group of GOP primary voters were actually those who called themselves "moderates," while Ted Cruz won respondents who said they were "extremely conservative." Later that year, we asked all respondents to place Trump on a 7-point ideology scale, where "1" meant "extremely liberal" and 7 meant "extremely conservative." Trump scored 5.0, placing him almost exactly at "slightly conservative."

But after Trump had been president for three years and had overseen major tax cuts and an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act — not to mention being the face of a growing contingent of MAGA-inspired conservatives — perceptions of him had changed. In January 2020, our panelists rated him a 5.6, meaning they saw him as closer to "conservative" than to "slightly conservative."

Other data reinforces the idea that perceptions of Trump continued to shift, and that he shed the perception of being a moderate. In April 2021, I teamed up with Hans Noel to ask political activists who was more conservative among pairs of prominent politicians. From those comparisons, we generated perceived ideology scores. By then, Trump was perceived by all respondents to be fairly far on the conservative end of the spectrum, with just ten GOP politicians to his right versus 43 to his left. (The Republicans who were perceived to be on his right are generally seen as Trump allies, such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.) It's noteworthy that at the time, Nikki Haley was ranked just two slots less conservative than Trump.

Noel and I replicated the analysis in November 2023 in a YouGov survey of American adults. Among Republican survey respondents, Ron DeSantis was thought to be the second most conservative figure, with only Ted Cruz viewed as more conservative. But Trump was also far on the conservative end of the spectrum, ranking fifth out of 23 Republicans on the list. It's no surprise that in that same survey, Trump's best group for the primary was respondents who called themselves "very conservative."

Haley, by contrast, had come to be seen as closer to the center of the GOP — she was viewed as more conservative than Mitch McConnell, Chris Christie and Kevin McCarthy, but also more liberal than fellow primary candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence, and Trump allies like Hawley and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Haley's best group in the November survey was self-described "moderates," although Trump still won that group with 51 percent compared to Haley's 18.

That reflects the fact that DeSantis and Haley cut somewhat different profiles among GOP primary voters. While Haley is the Trump challenger still in the race, DeSantis seems to have been the bigger threat to the conservative base that Trump has come to rely on. And with DeSantis out of the race, Trump has been able to consolidate the GOP's conservative wing, which has increasingly been defined by his politics since 2016.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor