Super Tuesday’s unsurprising elections should worry you
The election results, which advanced Biden and Trump on their way to the party conventions this summer, once again displayed the degraded state of American democracy. Photo: AP/Chris Carlson
Super Tuesday’s elections delivered no major surprises, which is another way of saying that US politics moved deeper into a bizzarro world from which no immediate escape is apparent.
President Joe Biden, who repeatedly shows weakness in polls, once again did pretty well with actual voters, easily running the table of Super Tuesday’s 15 states.
Super Tuesday is the presidential primary election day in February or March in every four-year election cycle when the biggest number of states hold primary elections and caucuses for both major parties to select their preferred nominee for the November general election.
While Biden’s Democratic opponents, Marianne Williamson and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, have attempted to provide a channel for protest, neither appears capable of transforming dissatisfaction with Biden into votes.
Biden typically won about 90% of the vote yesterday — although in Minnesota almost 20% of voters opted to remain uncommitted, and more than 10% had no preference in North Carolina.
Donald Trump, who does well in polls — coming out ahead of Biden in several recent high-profile surveys — continues to show some weakness among actual voters, especially more educated voters.
He appears set to win every contest, with the exception of delegate-poor Vermont, and he’s sure to sweep up the vast bulk of the 865 Republican delegates at stake, including those in Texas and California.
Public exit polls were conducted in only California, North Carolina and Virginia.
According to exit polls in Virginia, Trump crushed Republican rival Nikki Haley among White born-again or evangelical Christians, 79% to 20%, and among Republicans without college educations by a similar margin, 78-19.
But Haley outperformed Trump among college-educated voters in Virginia and reached 45% among those who identified as something other than born-again or evangelical Christian.
In North Carolina, Trump overwhelmed Haley among non-college voters, 80-15, and won voters of every education level except those with advanced degrees.
More than six in 10 North Carolina GOP primary voters said Trump would be fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime, and seven in 10 Trump voters said he shares their values.
Meanwhile, only half of Republican voters in North Carolina support a nationwide abortion ban.
In Virginia, only 37% support a nationwide ban, suggesting that even much of the GOP base is uneasy with the party’s assault on reproductive rights.
The election results, which advanced Biden and Trump on their way to the party conventions this summer, once again displayed the degraded state of American democracy.
Haley exited the race on Wednesday. But her race with Trump has provided new proofs of the descent of the GOP into White identity politics and cultural reaction.
In many ways, their competition looks like an inversion of the 1992 primary contest between President George HW Bush and Pat Buchanan, whose right-wing campaign was a precursor of Trump’s White nationalist fervour.
Buchanan was a far more honest and thoughtful campaigner than Trump. But the roughly 70-30 split between conservative Bush and reactionary Buchanan in 1992 has been flipped to Trump’s benefit in 2024.
MAGA is now the dominant faction of the party — and Haley, the mainstream conservative running in Bush’s shadow, can only hope to capture a consistent minority of the party vote.
Trump’s lies increasingly appear to be settled Republican dogma.
As CNN reported: "Across all of the states of the GOP primary this year where entrance and exit polls have been conducted — including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — none has seen a majority of the GOP electorate willing to acknowledge the results of the 2020 election."
In a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing state voters conducted online in February, more than one quarter of voters who said they intended to vote for Trump agreed that he is “dangerous”.
Meanwhile, in a New York Times/Siena poll conducted by phone in late February, 26% of registered voters said they more or less agreed with this seemingly incoherent statement: “Joe Biden’s age makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough.”
Polls are in the field. Voters are casting ballots. Delegates are pledging themselves to candidates. The system looks almost normal.
Don’t be fooled: It’s not.
- Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy.
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