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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Haley suspends her campaign

Haley is now speaking live from Charleston, South Carolina, and she just announced she is suspending her campaign. There are now no major Republican candidates left running against Trump.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Trump wins Alaska and Utah

While you were sleeping, ABC News projected Trump as the winner in the last two presidential contests: Alaska and Utah. Trump currently leads in Alaska 88 percent to 12 percent and in Utah 57 percent to 42 percent.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Good morning!

After a full-ish night's sleep, we're back on the live blog as the winners of several House primaries from Super Tuesday remain unknown. However, the big news this morning is that campaign sources are telling ABC News that Haley will suspend her campaign for president after winning just one primary yesterday, making Trump the presumptive Republican nominee. She will deliver remarks at 10 a.m. Eastern, and we'll cover it live right here.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538


Wrapping up for now

It's just past 2 a.m., and we've got major results in from most of Super Tuesday's wide-ranging slate of primary contests. So far, Trump has won at least 12 of the 15 states holding GOP presidential nominating contests, while Haley has won Vermont — though whether she hits a 50 percent (plus one vote) threshold of victory there will determine the exact number of delegates she takes home.

Either way, with an estimated 943 total delegates to Haley's 86 so far, per ABC News projections, Trump's well on his way to securing the magic delegate majority number of 1,215 — though it will take at least another week. He's so far secured 667 delegates tonight and is likely to hit the 769 mark that Elliott noted earlier would set him up to mathematically clinch the nomination on March 12. Of course, we're all watching to see if Haley drops out sooner.

In other highlights:

- As expected, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein secured their parties' respective nominations, and will go head to head in what's expected to be a close general election contest for governor.

- Rep. Colin Allred locked up the Democratic nomination in Texas's Senate race, and will face off against Sen. Ted Cruz in the general.

- Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff secured not only the top spot in a top-two primary, but also a likely glide path to the nomination, as the second spot on November's ballot went to Republican Steve Garvey instead of a second Democrat.

We're still tracking a dozen-odd downballot races that have yet to be projected, and awaiting presidential primary results in Utah and Alaska, so we'll see you back here tomorrow ... er, later today, with more results and analysis!

—Tia Yang, 538


Trump used to be seen as a moderate

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