EVEN IF ITS moniker might sound dramatic, ‘Super Tuesday’ rightly has its place as the most signficant voting day of the US primary season.
Put simply, Joe Biden would not be President Biden right now were it not for Super Tuesday four years ago.
Biden faced Super Tuesday 2020 in third place in the race, trailing both Senator Bernie Sanders and the upstart campaign of Pete Buttigieg.
He was struggling to consolidate a scattered moderate vote and was falling behind on campaign funding. He needed a big Super Tuesday and boy did he get it.
Buttigieg, who went on to be picked for Biden’s Cabinet, unexpectedly dropped out of the race ahead of Super Tuesday, clearing the field for Biden to take on Sanders in a number of states that were favourable to him.
Biden ended up winning ten states to Sanders’ four, with a big victory in South Carolina convincing many Democrats that he was the man to take on Donald Trump.
Trump himself took a giant leap towards his first nomination in 2016 by racking up seven Super Tuesday wins out of 11 to put Ted Cruz on the back foot.
Fast forward to today and while South Carolina is again significant, Super Tuesday is not.
Trump, now running as an electorally defeated and indicted former president, all but locked up his third straight Republican nomination last week with a victory in South Carolina.
South Carolina is the home state of his only remaining opponent Nikki Haley and his comfortable 60% to 40% victory removed any lingering hope she might have of winning the nomination through conventional means.
Haley is a former South Carolina governor and though she’s been spinning the 40% she won as an example of opposition to Trump, her inability to win in the state was basically the final nail in the coffin for her chances.
Haley did get her first win of the contest on Sunday when she won the Washington DC primary, but the fact that her only victory came in a Democrat-leaning jurisdiction that isn’t even a state doesn’t exactly build momentum going into today.
Democrats are technically holding a primary process too but incumbent Biden is a virtual dead cert.
How the primaries work
Presidential candidates are selected by party members who vote first in statewide elections known as primaries.
Candidates are allocated a certain number of party delegates from each state based on how well they did in statewide votes.
Those delegates then attend national party conventions and use their vote in accordance with how candidates performed in their state.
It varies state-by-state because some places use a winner-take-all system, but by-and-large the greater the margin of victory the greater the number of delegates a candidate will receive from that state.
As it stands, Trump has already amassed 244 delegates to Haley’s 43, giving him a commanding lead.
Actually up for decision today are fifteen states: Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.
Together they represent 874 delegates and if, as expected, Trump runs the table he will be nearing the 1,215 required to officially lock up the nomination.
In fact, Trump’s campaign is claiming he will win at least 773 delegates today and surpass the magic number needed to secure the nomination in about two weeks.
Momentum
Coming into Super Tuesday today Trump has all the momentum, something that was boosted further yesterday by a significan decision by the US Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court found that Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot in the general election was unconstitutional, effectively giving the former president an increasingly rare win in court as his legal troubles mount up.
His legal problems, which include a penalty from the state of New York that could top $500 bn and 91 felony counts across four prosecutions, are being touted as the reason why Haley has not yet dropped out of the race.
As the only other remaining Republican, Haley is the candidate best positioned to step in if Trump is unable to continue for whatever reason, be it legal or health-related.
The difficulty she may face after today, however, is increased pressure from within her own party if it becomes clear that Trump has already won the argument among Republicans.
Super Tuesday therefore mightn’t be as decisive as it has been in other years but it could let us know how long Haley has left before the Biden-Trump rematch is finally official.
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