Actually, in the past, Super Tuesday has mostly been about the central question: Who will be the challenger to the incumbent president? The incumbent presidents, when they run for re-election, also go through the process of their party’s primaries, but there have almost never been serious opponents. This was also the case this time with Joe Biden. His decision to run for a second term is not without controversy even within the Democratic Party, especially because of his age. But political heavyweights did not run against Biden. Before Super Tuesday, Biden was able to win almost all of the delegates for the Democratic convention in Chicago in August – apart from a very few delegate mandates that came about through the voting of “uncommitted” voters who expressed their criticism want to express the president’s Israel policy and be supported by a corresponding campaign.
It is politically clear who will run for the Democrats in the election on November 5th. For the Republicans, this question had already been politically clarified after two primaries in January, in Iowa and New Hampshire, but had not yet been formally decided: Donald Trump. Super Tuesday didn’t change that, it just once again emphatically confirmed Trump’s dominance. He gained 722 delegates, while Nikki Haley only gained 46 delegates. Donald Trump, who started out as an opponent of the Republican party establishment before his first Republican presidential candidacy, now has the party firmly under control.
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When will Trump secure the majority for the party conference?
Even before Super Tuesday, the question was no longer whether Trump would win the majority for the presidential nomination, but when. A candidate must win a majority of the 2,429 delegates to the July convention in Milwaukee to become the Republican presidential nominee. Mathematically, this majority could not be achieved on Super Tuesday. He now has 995 delegates.
The question of the majority is now less of a political question and more of a mathematical problem. However, a complicated one. Each state has different rules for how the electors are distributed: from the proportional allocation of delegates based on a candidate’s share of the vote to the possibility of a candidate receiving all delegate votes if he or she is ahead statewide. In California, the Republican Party changed the rules in Trump’s favor in 2023: If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, he or she will receive all 169 delegate votes. If no one reaches 50%, then it goes according to the proportional share. Trump has reached 50%. Trump’s campaign team assumes that the formal majority will be achieved on March 19th.
Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
© picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Tony Gutierrez
Nikki Haley am Ende des Kandidatenweges
Nikki Haley promised to hold out until Super Tuesday. She kept it that way, even though major donors had since dropped out because her candidacy seemed hopeless. She has since declared that she wants to suspend her candidacy. DeSantis hasn’t ended his campaign either. If court rulings take Trump out of the race, his competitors’ applications will only be legally suspended.
What will be more exciting will be whether Nikki Haley keeps her promise to support the majority-determined presidential candidate. These public so-called “endorsements” are common. However, Haley has qualified this promise in recent statements. The election campaign, which extends to personal defamation, shows Trump’s traces.
What tipped the balance in favor of Trump?
This election campaign between Republicans was hardly decided by differences on domestic political issues such as immigration. Trump, DeSantis and Haley are very conservative socio-politically, with little defining accents of their own. In foreign policy the differences are probably greater, but they have been little discussed. Trump’s statements about NATO have sparked a lot of criticism, but not from his supporters. He rarely said anything, even on issues as acute as Gaza. Trump softens statements with a recurring basic pattern: If is If he had been president, then Putin would not have attacked, then Hamas would not have attacked either. Trump is the inventor of the foreign policy subjunctive, which is also called irrealis in grammar.
Trump’s success in the primaries is based on his large, loyal Republican following, which has been with him through every primary, through every scandal and through every courtroom since the legend of the stolen 2020 election. It is still unclear whether this following will be large enough in November to make him president again. Because Trump will also be the most important reason for many voters to vote for Joe Biden.