On the glide path.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a Super Tuesday election night party Tuesday, March 5, 2024, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Yesterday, 15 states – one of which was Texas – held Republican primary elections. It’s the largest number of primary elections held on a single day, a fact that has earned it the title, “Super Tuesday.”
Former president Donald Trump characterized it like this:
They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is a big one.”
I have made several public and private predictions about this campaign cycle. One of them went bad on me yesterday. I predicted that Donald Trump would run the table on Tuesday and win all 15 state primaries. I was wrong. Nikki Haley, the only other candidate still in the race, won the state of Vermont by a bit less than 3,000 votes.
The rest of Super Tuesday belonged to Donald Trump. A big one for him, indeed.
In the 14 states that he won, he took an average of 73.1 percent of the vote. He captured Texas’s 141 convention delegates with 78 percent of the vote. He took California’s 169 delegates with 79 percent there.
Trump now has 995 of the 1,215 Republican National Convention delegates that he needs to win the nomination – which is to say that he is 82 percent of the way home. There are technically enough remaining delegates in the states that are still on the primary calendar between now and June for Nikki Haley to win the nomination. She’s not mathematically eliminated.
But she’d have to run the table. So far, her only win this primary season is in Vermont.
FOX News and the Wall Street Journal are both reporting this morning that she will suspend her campaign today but that she will not – at least for now – endorse Donald Trump.
So, the rest of the primary calendar is now just a formality. Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
On the Democratic side, speculation as to President Biden’s diminishing physical and mental abilities notwithstanding, he, too, is on a glide path to win his party’s nomination in Chicago this coming August.
If all of that holds up, America will see, for the first time in its 235-year history as a constitutional republic, a back-to-back rematch of a presidential election. We are well on the way to Trump v. Biden 2.0 this November.
Meanwhile, closer to home here in Texas, Dallas area congressman Colin Allred handily defeated State Senator from San Antonio Roland Gutierrez to win the right to face Ted Cruz in the race for the United States Senate. The Texas U.S. Senate race is a major focus of the Democratic Party this cycle. The Democrats believe that Sen. Cruz’s seat in the Senate can be flipped, and the party has made it clear that they will dedicate an enormous amount of money to the race.
