Trump and Biden look to clinch nominations in the most predictable Super Tuesday in history
The Republican and Democratic candidates are coming into this week’s contest with unusually large leads over their rivals
In the religious and agrarian society of 19th century America, Sunday was a day for Mass and rest, and Wednesday was market day. For many, it took a day by carriage to reach their polling place, which meant an election could not be held on Monday or Thursday either. So by way of deduction and for convenience’s sake, Tuesday became election day par excellence. Federal elections in the United States are held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November (so that it wouldn’t fall on November 1, All Saints’ Day). But another Tuesday has emerged in recent decades as a key election date: Super Tuesday, the day when the most U.S. states vote in the presidential primaries.
Super Tuesday has seen decisive battles for the nomination. But this year, that won’t be the case. Both the Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, and the Democrat candidate, U.S. President Joe Biden, are set to win overwhelmingly in what is the least competitive Super Tuesday in history.
Biden is running practically unchallenged, as is often the case with incumbent presidents. The peculiarity of this year’s primaries is that the outcome of the opposition party has also become a foregone conclusion. Trump has dominated the race, despite losing the District of Columbia to Nikki Haley on Sunday. The nomination of Biden and Trump seems inevitable, and the polls suggest this will be confirmed on Super Tuesday, when 15 states head to the polls.
Neither Biden nor Trump can mathematically secure the nomination, not even by winning all the delegates at stake for the summer conventions. To pass the threshold of half plus one of the delegates, they will have to wait at least until another Tuesday: March 12 (for Trump) and March 19 (for Biden). But if the forecasts are met, there will be no doubt about the result.
In other election years, Super Tuesday was a fierce battle between presidential hopefuls of both the Republican and Democratic Party. This time, that’s not the case for either group. In 2020, Biden won 10 states and 726 delegates on Super Tuesday, but Bernie Sanders won four others, including California, for a total of 505 delegates. That day put Biden’s nomination on track, but it was a day of high tension, with close victories.
In 2016, there was double the excitement on Super Tuesday. In the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton won seven states (486 delegates) while Sanders won four (321 delegates). And on the Republican side, Trump won in seven of the 11 states, but Ted Cruz won in three others and Marco Rubio, in one. Trump, in fact, only won 256 of the 600 delegates up for grabs. The race was so close that when five states voted two weeks later, the day was called Super Tuesday II. This led to clearer — although not overwhelming — victories for Clinton and Trump.
Even more exciting was the 2008 Democratic Super Tuesday, a dog-eat-dog battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which ended in a near draw. Obama won in 13 states and Clinton in 10, but the number of delegates was even closer: 847 to 834. In addition, more states voted that year than ever before, which is why it was called Tsunami Tuesday and Super Dupa Tuesday, among other nicknames. On the Republican side, with 21 states at stake, John McCain won nine, Mitt Romney won seven and Mike Huckabee won five.
Indeed, Super Tuesday was more hotly contested, at least in one of the two parties, in all past presidential races since the concept triumphed in the 1980s. The only precedent comparable to today’s is 1996, when then-president Bill Clinton was unchallenged in the Democratic Party, and the Republican front-runner, Bob Dole, won every state. However, on that occasion only seven states voted, and there was somewhat more uncertainty, as Dole’s main rival, Pat Buchanan, had scored previous victories in New Hampshire and Louisiana.
What’s more, this year Republican delegate allocation rules favor Trump. In several states, the winner takes all delegates if they win more than 50% of the vote (which is likely to happen everywhere, as there are only two candidates). One of the winner-take-all states is California, where the most delegates are awarded (169). In Texas (161), the system is similar, but based on the respective majority achieved in the district and state. Trump has a wide lead in both areas.
At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — which will take place between July 15 and 19 — there are 2,429 delegates. To secure the nomination, Trump needs 1,215 delegates. He has about 270 and on Tuesday, 874 are at stake. This means he will have to wait at least until March 12, when 161 delegates are up for grabs, before he has the numbers to cinch the nomination.
In the Democratic Party, Biden must get 1,968 pledged delegates out of a total of 3,934 to secure the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago, Illinois. He has 206 of the 208 that have been awarded, and 1,420 will be allocated on Tuesday. Since the Democratic calendar is somewhat behind the Republican one, he will not pass that threshold until March 19, even if he continues to win in all states.
On Super Tuesday, voters in both primaries will head to the polls in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. In addition to those 14 states, there are also Republican caucuses in Alaska. In the case of the Democratic Party, the results of Iowa’s mail-in vote will be revealed, and primaries will also be held in the U.S. territory of American Samoa.
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