Overnight last night, ABC News projected that firearms manufacturer Pat Harrigan will be the GOP nominee in North Carolina's 10th District. He defeated more conservative Republican Grey Mills 41 percent to 39 percent. The 10th District is a solidly red seat currently represented by retiring Rep. Patrick McHenry, and Harrigan should have no trouble winning it in the fall.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

Last night, the "uncommitted" campaign made headway in a few more states. After a protest vote for Biden's response to Israel's war against Gaza helped net over 100,000 uncommitted votes in last week's Michigan Democratic primary, supporters of the Listen to Michigan campaign expanded their efforts to other states with "uncommitted" or similar language as an option on primary ballots.

With 89 percent of the expected vote reporting, 19 percent of Democratic primary voters in Minnesota voted uncommitted, eclipsing the 13 percent reached last week in Michigan. That means "uncommitted" will send at least 8 (and up to 11) delegates from Minnesota to the Democratic National Convention in August, per the latest ABC News projections.

"No preference" also garnered 13 percent of ballots cast in North Carolina and 9 percent in Massachusetts, while 8 percent of primary voters in Colorado chose "noncommitted." However, those aren't enough to meet their respective states' thresholds to send a delegate to the national convention. (That's 15 percent in all three of those states.)

—Irena Li, 538

While Haley called on Trump to earn Republicans' votes, Mitch McConnell suggested that he already has. "It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States," McConnell said in a statement. The rest was pretty standard endorsement fare, going on to tout Trump's accomplishments on tax reform and judicial appointments, and criticizing Biden.

It's an undramatic end to the minor drama over whether the soon-departing majority leader would endorse Trump, with whom he's undoubtedly had a rocky relationship. In the end, McConnell waited until just after Trump's final major opponent dropped out to fall in line. With one of the last major (potential) party holdouts in his corner, the general election train is in full swing for Trump.

—Tia Yang, 538

According to the latest numbers from our colleagues at ABC News, Trump has 1,051 of the 1,215 delegates he needs to mathematically clinch the Republican nomination for president. Haley's withdrawal from the race puts him on track to reach that magic number next Tuesday, March 12. A total of 199 delegates will be allocated between now and then, and presumably Trump will win all or almost all of them.

—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