Trump’s smashing victories across the country on Tuesday will put an end to the 2024 Republican primary, for all intents and purposes.
Nikki Haley dominated Donald Trump on Super Tuesday among voters who believe the economy is doing well and those who approve of the job President Biden is doing. Unfortunately for Haley, she is seeking the Republican nomination. And among the groups that mattered on that front, she got trounced — and her exit from the race is likely imminent.
Trump’s smashing victories across the country on Tuesday will put an end to the 2024 Republican primary, for all intents and purposes. Even before the results came out, Haley’s team announced that she would be watching the results from home in South Carolina, without making any remarks — and she has not scheduled any future events. These are all signs of a campaign that has reached its end.
Now that we have made it to this point — which has seemed increasingly inevitable for months — we can view the past four years with a bit more perspective. And what has become clear is that at no point did the Republican Party stop being the party of Trump. Not after he lost to Biden. Not after January 6. Not after his hand-picked candidates lost in 2022.
It is now taken as obvious that the sympathy for Trump stemming from multiple indictments put the nomination out of reach for anybody else. But the fact that the reflex among Republican voters was to rally behind him suggests that they never truly left him in the first place.
Trump coasted to victory in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He is now crushing Super Tuesday, where it is looking like Vermont will be his only defeat (a state filled with liberal Republicans in which Democrats are allowed to vote in the primary).
Virginia was supposed to be a relatively strong state for Haley due to the population centers in the suburbs of D.C. (which was the only contest she had won before Vermont) and the fact that it is an open primary. Trump still won by about 30 points. Exit polls show Haley was buoyed in Virginia because she won 84 percent of Democrats, but Trump won 79 percent of GOP voters.
It turned out to be one of her better states. Trump won nearly three-quarters of the vote in North Carolina, and the exit polls underscore the extent to which there aren’t many pockets of resistance to Trump’s nomination among Republicans. He dominated every age group and beat Haley among military veterans and those who had never served. More than twice as many voters there said Trump was more physically and mentally fit to serve as president than the much younger Haley, and 65 percent said Trump would still be “fit” if convicted of a crime.
Of the additional states that have been called as of this writing, Trump is winning Massachusetts by about 25 points; Colorado by about 30 points; Maine by about 45 points; Arkansas and Minnesota by over 50 points; Texas and Tennessee by about 60 points; Oklahoma by 65 points; and Alabama by over 70 points.
In his race for the Republican nomination, Trump did not debate, and he barely campaigned. He didn’t elaborate on his policy proposals. Ron DeSantis tried to run against him from the right, Chris Christie from the left, and Nikki Haley from the middle. None of it mattered. All that mattered was that most Republican voters were always with Trump.