Piling Up Wins on Super Tuesday, Trump and Biden Move Closer to Rematch

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump romped through Super Tuesday, amassing huge delegate hauls in California, Texas and beyond as they moved inexorably toward their parties’ nominations and a rematch for the White House in November.

Trump’s primary rival, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, secured Vermont, according to The Associated Press, depriving Trump of a clean sweep. Even with that lone defeat, Trump took a giant step toward the nomination Tuesday night, winning a dozen states by just after 11 p.m. Eastern time. The Associated Press has yet to call a Republican winner in Utah.

Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, home, the former president made no mention of Haley, instead calling for “unity.”

“We want to have unity,” he declared, “and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly.”

Haley was having none of it. Her campaign spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, fired off a statement saying: “Unity is not achieved by simply claiming, ‘We’re united.’ Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump.”

On the Democratic side, President Joe Biden swept all 15 states that held Democratic contests, as well as the Iowa caucuses. His one stumble came in American Samoa, a tiny American territory in the Pacific Ocean, where he tied a little-known businessman, Jason Palmer, for the territory’s delegates, with three each, according to The Associated Press. (The party originally reported that Palmer had won a majority.)

Biden also looked toward the general election, declaring in a statement: “My message to the country is this: Every generation of Americans will face a moment when it has to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. To every Democrat, Republican and independent who believes in a free and fair America: This is our moment. This is our fight. Together, we will win.”

Super Tuesday quickly proved it would be a major disappointment for Haley. After winning the Republican primary in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, she was hoping the northern Virginia suburbs would mirror the city across the Potomac River and deliver the state of Virginia to her. They did not. After that, one state after another slipped from her grasp.

The contests on Tuesday night will all but determine the presidential candidates for the November election and shape Congress and statehouses for next year and beyond.

Despite his dominance, Biden, who is scheduled to give the State of the Union address on Thursday, faced a protest vote in Minnesota, where pro-Palestinian advocates were hoping votes for “uncommitted” would embarrass the president and raise pressure on him to shift his pro-Israel policies as the war in the Gaza Strip grinds on. With more than 95% of ballots counted early Wednesday, “uncommitted” had earned 19% support, enough to send delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

“He’s going too easy on Netanyahu,” said Mark Suchy, 76, of Minneapolis, who had voted “uncommitted” on Tuesday. “He needs to cut the military funding.”

Democrats have worried that such feelings could depress turnout among the party’s voters in November, but Suchy called himself a “strong Biden supporter” and said he planned to vote for Biden on Election Day.

For Haley, the Super Tuesday results will mean still more calls for her to end her unlikely campaign for the presidency. She was back in the Charleston, South Carolina, area Tuesday after a national campaign swing, with no public events planned. Describing her team as “a bunch of happy warriors today,” a spokesperson for her campaign said they had been working to get out the vote, without offering specifics: “playing music and having fun.”

For months now, and with increasingly urgent language, Haley, who was Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, has tried to paint her former boss as an aging, mentally unsound agent of chaos, unable to respect veterans or service members and unwilling to be faithful to the Constitution.

But though her campaign has exposed cracks in Republican Party unity, she has not loosened his grip on the Republican electorate.

“We want someone that’s decisive, someone that understands the issues — especially with the border, it seems that Trump does understand — and wants what’s best for all of us,” said Ramiro Lopez, 36, of McAllen, Texas, who voted for Trump on Tuesday.

Haley will have to decide whether to soldier on with financial resources that are likely to dwindle, leave the race and endorse Trump, or leave the race and withhold her endorsement for now. The centrist group No Labels has made it clear it would like Haley to agree to serve on a “unity ticket” that the group’s leaders are still pondering. But she has said she will not.

Voters were also deciding on the contestants for other important elections that will shape Congress and state capitals next year and beyond.

In North Carolina, the same Republican voters who sided with Trump selected Mark Robinson, the state’s conservative lieutenant governor, who has a history of offensive and polarizing comments, to run for the governorship in November. Democrats in North Carolina selected the state attorney general, Josh Stein, to run against Robinson in a contest to succeed North Carolina’s term-limited Democratic governor, Roy Cooper.

In California, the marquee race was for the Senate seat held until last year by Dianne Feinstein, who died at 90 in September. Rep. Adam Schiff emerged from a clash of high-profile Democrats competing for the seat, along with Republican Steve Garvey.

Under California’s so-called jungle primary system, all candidates compete in the same primary, regardless of party, and the top two vote-getters face off in November. For much of the campaign, it looked as if the top two finalists would be Democrats, Schiff and Rep. Katie Porter.

Then came the rise of a celebrity Republican — Garvey, the former Los Angeles Dodgers great. He did not do much campaigning, but Schiff, figuring that in a Democratic state like California a Republican would be easier to beat in November, spent $10 million on ads that ostensibly attacked Garvey as “too conservative for California,” but intentionally elevated his candidacy.

California also had the most consequential House primary of Super Tuesday, thanks again to its top-two-finishers primary system. Democrats dearly want to take the Central Valley district that runs from Bakersfield to Fresno from the Republican incumbent, David Valadao. The newly drawn district would have favored Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.

But before they had a chance to try to win it, Democrats had to contend with each other. The party’s chosen candidate, a former assemblyman named Rudy Salas, was facing a spirited Democratic opponent in Melissa Hurtado, whose state Senate seat mirrors the U.S. House district. Both want to be the Central Valley’s first Mexican American representative, but if Democratic turnout is low and divided, Valadao could end up facing his Republican challenger, Chris Mathys, in November. Valadao and Salas were the top two vote-getters in early returns, leading Mathys.

In Texas, the down-ballot races highlighted Republican-on-Republican rivalries, driven by the state’s polarizing attorney general, Ken Paxton, who was backing several conservative candidates in legislative primaries in an attempt to unseat Republicans who had voted for his impeachment. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was also hoping Republican primary challengers could unseat opponents of his plan to use public funds to help families pay for private and religious schools.

It remained unclear Tuesday how many of the embattled incumbents would survive, but the Texas House speaker, Dade Phelan, was forced into a runoff against David Covey, a conservative activist backed by Trump.

In the state’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Rep. Colin Allred, a Dallas-area congressman who defeated an incumbent Republican to gain his seat in 2018, emerged on top of a crowded field seeking to challenge Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, in November.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.