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Donald Trump cruised to victory in nearly all of the states holding Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, on a night that took him to the brink of securing his party’s presidential nomination to face Joe Biden in this year’s White House race.
By 11.30pm Eastern Time, Trump had won 12 of the 15 states voting on Super Tuesday, a pivotal date on the primary calendar.
The former president’s dominance — which included wins in California and Texas, the biggest prizes of the night — will heap more pressure on his main rival, Nikki Haley, to abandon her bid.
Trump is rapidly approaching the 1,215 delegates to the Republican National Convention that he needs to seal the party’s nomination in July — but is still not expected to cross that threshold until later this month.
Speaking to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump acted as the presumptive nominee and turned to the general election battle ahead. He called on all Republicans to fully embrace his campaign.
“We have a great Republican party with tremendous talent. And we want to have unity and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly,” the former president said in remarks that lasted about 20 minutes.
Haley had won just one Super Tuesday state, Vermont, by late in the evening, according to the Associated Press. It was her second victory in the Republican primary race after she secured delegates from the District of Columbia, the seat of the US capital.
A Haley campaign spokesperson on Tuesday night did not address the future of her campaign but criticised Trump’s comments. “Unity is not achieved by simply claiming ‘we’re united’. Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump. That is not the unity our party needs for success,” the spokesperson said.
Biden has dominated the Democratic primary contests so far, overcoming challenges from rivals Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson that never gained traction. He swept all the states holding votes on Super Tuesday.
The results set the US up for the first presidential election rematch since 1956, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower beat Democrat Adlai Stevenson for a second consecutive time.
“Tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice,” Biden said in a statement on Tuesday. “Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division and darkness that defined his term in office?”
Polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans do not want to see Biden, who is 81, and Trump, 77, facing off again for the White House, but primary voters in both parties have slammed the door shut on any alternatives as rival campaigns faltered.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham urged Haley to be a “team player” and support Trump’s campaign instead of continuing her own bid. “I find it difficult to imagine Nikki Haley would not support President Trump when it’s all said and done,” Graham told CNN.
Trump’s overwhelming advantage in the Republican primary contest represents a startling comeback for the former president, who was impeached twice by the House of Representatives while he was in office and is facing 91 criminal charges in federal and state courts.
Trump has continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, and warned that he would seek revenge against his political opponents if he wins another term in office.
But many Republican voters believe he has been a victim of political persecution and fail to blame Trump for the attack by a mob of his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
They yearn for a new crackdown on immigration at the border with Mexico and a return to the pre-pandemic economy under Trump, when inflation was subdued, interest rates were low and unemployment was slightly below its level today.
Republican voters have also largely embraced Trump’s isolationist foreign policy views and shrugged off his more favourable stance on Russian President Vladimir Putin, including his recent suggestion that Russia do “whatever the hell they want” to Nato allies that do not spend enough on defence.
Trump reprised his isolationist approach to national security repeatedly during his speech on Tuesday night. Referring to his first term in office, he said: “We were getting along with everybody. We were getting along and we were respected by everybody and we had no wars”.
Trump has been able to cast himself as a viable general election candidate against Biden, despite his defeat in 2020 and the defeat of several of his preferred congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Some general election polls now also show him holding a slight lead over Biden.
Nevertheless, his ability to win over moderate and swing voters remains in question, because of his abrasive rhetoric and extreme nature of some of his policies. A potentially decisive factor in November will be whether Haley supporters back Trump, flip to Biden, switch to a third-party candidate, or stay home altogether.
Biden also has political vulnerabilities, starting with many Americans’ belief that he is too old for another four years in the White House — but also discontent with his handling of the economy, immigration and even foreign policy. His clearest edge is on the issue of abortion, following the conservative-led Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the constitutional right to end a pregnancy. “[Trump] is determined to destroy our democracy, rip away fundamental freedoms like the ability for women to make their own healthcare decisions, and pass another round of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy — and he’ll do or say anything to put himself in power,” Biden said.
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