By EFE
05 Mar 2024, 08:09 AM EST
Raleigh – The president of the United States, Joe Biden, and his great rival, former president Donald Trump, undergo an atypical Super Tuesday, the big day of the primaries for the November presidential elections, in which the nominations of both are practically guaranteed.
Biden has no adversary within the Democratic ranks because he is the incumbent president, while Trump enjoys an unusual advantage in the Republican primaries, where only the former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is left trying to overshadow him without too much success.
Super Tuesday is the day in which the most states vote to define the presidential candidates: this year there are 15 of the 50 that make up the country, including California and Texas, the largest in the United States.
Democratic and Republican voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Virginia also go to the polls.
Alaska also holds the Republican primaries and Democrats also vote abroad and in the territories of American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.
At stake 35% of the delegates
At stake are more than 35% of the delegates who will meet in the summer at the Republican conventions in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and the Democratic conventions in Chicago (Illinois) to choose their candidate for the White House.
Traditionally, Super Tuesday has served as a turning point in the election of the opposition candidate due to the large number of delegates distributed.
However, Trump comes to this day with the label of unbeatable, having swept almost every election since the Republican primaries started with the Iowa caucuses on January 15.
All of his rivals have already dropped out of the race except Haley, who only beat the New York tycoon in the District of Columbia primary this past weekend, a victory with hardly any political weight.
Will Haley’s candidacy survive Super Tuesday?
In fact, the big question is whether Haley’s candidacy will survive Super Tuesday or whether she will bow to growing pressure from her party and donors to throw in the towel.
Furthermore, Trump (2017-2021) goes to the polls emboldened after his judicial victory on Monday, when the Supreme Court ordered the lifting of his disqualification from the Colorado primaries, a state that also votes this Tuesday.
The ruling, adopted unanimously, also put an end to attempts by Illinois and Maine to remove the former Republican president from the process.
For his part, Biden won on Super Tuesday 2020 over his then Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, and four years later he arrives at this meeting with almost no internal dispute.
Since the Democratic primaries started on February 3 in South Carolina, it has only lost two delegates at stake in the internal elections in Michigan, where a protest vote for the Gaza war was organized.
Despite their indisputable advantage, neither Biden nor Trump will be able to mathematically win the nomination this Super Tuesday and will have to wait a few more days.
Not even in the hypothetical case that they took over all the delegates in contention, neither would Biden still achieve the magic figure of 1,968 that he must achieve to win the Democratic nomination, nor would Trump do the same with the 1,215 that he needs.
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Nikki Haley won the Republican primary in Washington and beat Trump for the first time