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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ABC News projects Haley will win Vermont

And now ABC also projects that Haley will win Vermont. The race remains super close, however, and it’s not yet clear how delegates will be awarded.

—Monica Potts, 538


California voters don’t view either party favorably

Polls have now closed in California, where all parties run on a single primary ballot (other than in presidential races). Unfortunately, neither party is particularly popular in the state. According to a February survey from the Public Policy Institute of California, likely primary voters in California don’t have a favorable view of either political party: The Democratic party is underwater by 10 percentage points, with 44 percent of likely voters saying they have a favorable impression of the party and 54 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. The Republican party fares even worse, with a net favorability of -55 points, 22 percent favorable and 77 percent unfavorable.

—Mary Radcliffe, 538


Haley likely to win Vermont, but the critical margin is still up in the air

The New York Times and the Associated Press have projected that Haley will win the Republican primary in Vermont, making it the second win for her after Washington, D.C. (ABC News has not yet made a projection in this race.)

While Trump remains ahead on the delegate count, the win could give some juice to her campaign. She's vowed to stay in because she says that Trump and Biden are both too old and out of touch, and she has been capturing a sizable minority of primary voters who are unhappy with the former president in many states across the country. Still, she'll need to get a majority of the final vote to take all of the delegates, and that remains up in the air. With 92 percent of the expected vote in, she has 49.7 percent to Trump's 46 percent. If neither candidate reaches 50.1 percent, they'll split the state's delegates.

—Monica Potts, 538


Heading to a runoff in North Carolina’s 13th?

North Carolina’s 13th District is yet another Democratic-held seat that North Carolina Republicans redrew this year to be safely red. Unsurprisingly, the GOP primary attracted a wide field, and with 67 percent of the expected vote counted according to the Associated Press, attorney Kelly Daughtry is in first place with 29 percent, followed by former federal prosecutor Brad Knott with 18 percent, businessman DeVan Barbour with 17 percent and yet another businessman Fred Von Canon with 16 percent. As a reminder, if no one gets 30 percent, the runner-up is entitled to request a runoff.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 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