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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Donald Trump won in more than two-thirds of the states that held Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, on a night that will put him on the verge of securing his party’s presidential nomination to face Joe Biden in this year’s race for the White House .
As of 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, Trump had won 11 of 15 states voting on Super Tuesday, a crucial date in the primary calendar. The former president’s dominance will increase pressure on his main rival, Nikki Haley, to abandon his candidacy.
Haley has won only one primary so far in this year’s Republican nominating contest, in the District of Columbia, home to the U.S. capital. Four more states, including California, will declare their results later Tuesday.
Trump is expected to come close to the 1,215 Republican National Convention delegates he needs to seal the party’s nomination in July, but he won’t cross that threshold until later this month.
Biden has dominated the Democratic primaries in every state that has voted so far, overcoming challenges from rivals Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson who have never achieved any significant success. On Tuesday she won the Iowa caucus, which was a mail-in race, with the support of 91% of Democratic voters in the Midwestern state. According to the Associated Press, she had also won primaries in seven other states by 8:45 p.m. Eastern time.
The results set the United States up for its first presidential election rematch since 1956, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson for the second straight time.
“Tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday. “Will we continue to move forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us back into the chaos, division and darkness that characterized his tenure?”
Polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans don’t want to see Biden, 81, and Trump, 77, face off again for the White House, but primary voters of both parties have slammed the door on any alternative as rival campaigns faltered.
Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, urged Haley in an interview with CNN to be a “team player” and support Trump’s campaign instead of continuing her own race. “I find it hard to imagine that Nikki Haley would not support President Trump when all is said and done,” Graham said.
Trump’s overwhelming lead in the Republican primaries represents a stunning comeback for the former president, who was impeached twice by the House of Representatives while in office and faces 91 criminal charges in federal and state courts.
Trump continued to deny the results of the 2020 election on the campaign trail and warned that he will seek revenge against his political opponents if he wins another term.
But many Republican voters believe he was the 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 want a new, massive crackdown on immigration at the Mexican border and a return to the pre-pandemic economy under Trump, when inflation was subdued, interest rates were low and unemployment was slightly lower than today’s level.
Republican voters have also largely embraced Trump’s isolationist views on foreign policy and have shrugged off his more favorable stance toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, including his recent suggestion that Russia should do “whatever the hell it wants.” to NATO allies who don’t spend enough on defense.
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But perhaps most importantly, Trump managed to present himself as a viable candidate in the general election against Biden, despite his defeat in 2020 and the defeat of many of his preferred congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Trump is been helped by general election polls showing him ahead of Biden by 2 percentage points nationally, according to the latest average on Realclearpolitics.com.
However, his ability to win over moderate and anti-Biden swing voters remains in question, due to his abrasive style and rhetoric, as well as the extreme nature of some of his policies. A potentially deciding factor in November will be whether Haley voters in the Republican primary will switch to Trump, switch to Biden, switch to a third-party candidate or stay home altogether.
Biden has his own major political vulnerabilities, starting with many Americans’ belief that he is too old to hold office for another four years, but also discontent with his handling of a number of crucial issues, including the economy, immigration and even foreign policy. . Biden’s only clear advantage at the moment is on the issue of abortion and reproductive rights, following the conservative-led Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to strike down the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.