Trump only loses Vermont
Joe Biden — © AP
Donald Trump dominated the Republican primaries as expected: he won in Maine, Massachusetts, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and California. The latter state immediately accounts for the largest number of electoral votes (169), all of which go to him according to the ‘winner takes all’ principle. We are also still waiting for the results from Utah and Alaska, but there too there is a good chance that Trump will win.
For Trump, there was only one flaw on Super Tuesday: Nikki Haley won by just under three thousand votes in the progressive state of Vermont. Surprising, because the polls seemed to give Haley chances in Massachusetts. There he did better than expected.
“They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing. This was a great night and a great day,” Trump responded in a speech from Mar-a-Lago. The former president called Joe Biden “the worst president in the history of our country”, and spent a lot of time on things that he believes the president is doing wrong.
Pain point
Trump has now collected 922 electoral votes. To earn the nomination, he must collect 1,215 delegates, a threshold he could reach on March 12. Haley would now have 92 delegates, and it is therefore almost impossible for her to win the nomination.
However, the continued support for the former UN ambassador seems to indicate that a significant portion of Republican voters – predominantly urban and highly educated – would rather die than vote for Trump, a sore point that could soon prove to be a strategic obstacle in the general elections.
(Read more below the photo.)
Donald Trump — © Getty Images via AFP
Biden loses in American Samoa, but Minnesota is especially painful
Current President Joe Biden – as tradition demands – has no real opponents in the Democratic primaries, and won in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Utah, Colorado and Texas. Biden has 1,424 delegates, and is therefore well on his way to reaching the 1,968 delegate mark for the nomination.
Only in the overseas territory of American Samoa did Biden surprisingly lose to local businessman Jason Palmer, but that is only important for the history books: barely 91 votes were cast there.
Warning for Trump
More worrying appears to be the number of blank votes in the state of Minnesota, where almost a fifth of voters voted ‘undecided’. Many voters of Arab descent live in that progressive state, who seem to resent Biden’s attitude towards Israel, a sore point that could also arise in November.
Biden will therefore have to look for ways to unite his party in November to keep his chances of re-election intact. Biden therefore warned in a written statement against a return to Trump. “Do we keep moving forward or allow Donald Trump to drag us backward into the chaos, division and darkness that defined his term?” “He is determined to destroy our democracy and take away fundamental freedoms,” he said. “Trump is driven by resentment and is focused on his own revenge and retaliation, not the American people,” Biden said.
Biden’s campaign team also stated that it is interested in seeing which Haley voters it will be able to convince in November.
Joe Biden — © AP