Haley won one more heavily Democratic state but the day belonged to the front-runner.
Donald Trump won all but one of the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday, and the vast majority of delegates awarded, eliminating any serious doubt that he will clinch the GOP nomination this month. His victories spanned the country from Maine to Alaska and included mega-states such as California and Texas.
Nikki Haley did obtain the consolation prize of a narrow win in Vermont (which gave Joe Biden his highest percentage of the vote in 2020), adding it to the even-more-Democratic District of Columbia in her victory column. Vermont is a state where Democrats could and clearly did cross over to smite Trump, and Haley did relatively well in other states where non-Republicans were permitted to participate, topping a third of the vote in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
But more typical were Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Tennessee, which Trump won by over 50 points. He did not, moreover, underperform the expectations set by polls, providing an ephemeral sense of Haley momentum. Instead, in the three states where there was exit polling (California, North Carolina, and Virginia), it was clearer than ever that Trump is the overwhelming favorite of self-identified Republicans, with much of Haley’s vote coming from Democratic-leaning independents who probably were never on the table for the GOP in November.
In Virginia, for example, 10 percent of Republican primary voters were self-identified Democrats and 30 percent were independents, and fully 19 percent gave Joe Biden a thumbs-up on his job performance. Among these Biden-friendly voters, Haley won by a 92 percent to 5 percent margin. Among the 81 percent who did not positively adjudge Biden, Trump won by 76 percent to 21 percent margin. It was less and less of a contest the closer you got to the heart of the GOP electorate.
It’s emblematic that the two big endorsements Haley won on the brink of Super Tuesday, from Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski and Maine senator Susan Collins, apparently had zero impact on Republican voters in their states. Trump won 88 percent of the vote in Alaska and 72 percent in Maine.
Overall, the New York Times projects that when all the Super Tuesday ballots are counted, Trump will have nearly 7.7 million votes to Haley’s 2.6 million. NBC News estimates that Trump has won 1,002 delegates of the 1,214 needed for the nomination and Haley only 92. There is no way she can spin Tuesday night as a moral victory or as a sign the GOP is reluctantly going along with a third straight nomination for the 45th president.
But as the catastrophe descended, her campaign professed to be upbeat, as the Associated Press reported:
Haley, who as of midnight had logged her only victory of the day in Vermont, spent the night huddled with staff watching returns near her South Carolina home.
“The mood is jubilant,” spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said. “There is lots of food and music.”
Haley did not pledge to continue her candidacy beyond this very unsuccessful day, but clearly some of her supporters — not to mention fellow travelers who simply want to cause trouble for Trump — want her to keep going until the money runs out, and perhaps all the way to the convention. Even if Trump has a medical crisis or is convicted of a felony, there is no circumstance in which Haley is going to win the Republican nomination; a convention stuffed with MAGA delegates is not going to settle for this last-ditch Trump opponent as though they don’t have several hundred more suitable options.
Whatever Haley decides to do, the nominating calendar will turn a page, moving on to March 12, when Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington vote. It’s not likely the trajectory of the contest will change unless Trump is uncontested entirely.
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