The Facts From the Fiction: A Super Tuesday Compendium

Winners, losers, and warning signs.

by Mark Angelides | Mar 6, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags:Articles, Good Reads, Politics

Two presidents, one current, one former, competed for the souls of their respective parties on Super Tuesday, and as the results crystalized this morning, March 6, a snapshot of the next eight months came into focus. Joe Biden and Donald Trump dominated their primary races, all but ensuring a 2024 rematch. And yet, beyond the big wins, there were portents of possible electoral danger. Will either man heed the “here there be dragons” signs?

Trump’s Super Tuesday Showdown

Former President Trump won commanding victories in 12 of 13 state primaries and in both caucuses – losing just Vermont to Nikki Haley. Not all delegates have been assigned at the time of publishing, but based on projections, Mr. Trump has between 900 and 1,017; just a few hundred shy of the 1,215 needed to clinch the GOP presidential nomination. With big-ticket races coming on March 12 and 19, it is highly unlikely this contest will last beyond the month.

Wins: Of the primaries and caucuses won by Donald Trump, his average lead over Haley adds up to 45.8% in each locale. Speaking without a teleprompter, he said that his successful campaign would “unify this country and unify this party,” and that “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 gonna happen very quickly.” He also warned of the dangers facing the nation, saying:

“Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime. But it’s a new category and it’s violent, where they’ll stand in the middle of the street and have fistfights with police officers. And if they did that in their countries from where they came, they’d be killed instantly. They wouldn’t do that. So, the world is laughing at us. The world is taking advantage of us.”

Trump veered off that track to highlight what he calls the weaponization of government agencies under Biden, declaring that “It happens in third world countries … And in some ways, we’re a third world country. We live in a third world country with no borders … We need a fair and free press. The press has not been fair, nor has it been free … The press used to police our country. Now nobody has confidence in them.”

(Photo by Arturo Jimenez/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Losses: Haley managed to eat away at Trump’s overall support in a number of states. It seems clear that there is some appetite for a candidate other than he; not enough to deny him the nomination, but certainly a figure that could prove decisive in the November presidential contest.

Losing Vermont to Haley – while not entirely unexpected – could give her the impetus she needs to stay in the race, denying Trump the presumptive nominee status that would benefit him not only with fundraising but also his many tangled legal woes. It is one thing for the Department of Justice to prosecute a presidential hopeful, it is quite another to go after an official contender. However, Fox News reports this morning that according to its inside sources, an imminent departure may be in the cards for the former South Carolina governor.

Danger Zones: If Trump hopes to prevail and win a second term in the White House, he will need to shore up support from voters outside his natural base. Haley has done reasonably well with independent voters; repudiating them for their support of a candidate other than himself is a surefire way to lose their crucial November vote.

Biden’s Easy Street Campaign

The president handily won all the states competing in yesterday’s Super Tuesday contest. He has approximately 1,500 delegates in the bag, and is just 500 away from the requisite 1,968 – not that there was ever really any doubt.

Wins: Despite all the chatter that Biden is too old, or too cognitively challenged to serve a second term (from both sides of the aisle), no significant Democrat candidate stepped forward to try and take the crown. With the biggest day on the primary calendar done, any longshot candidacy is dead in the water.

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) came close to admitting his challenge is effectively over in an X post, writing:

“Congratulations to Joe Biden, Uncommitted, Marianne Williamson, and Nikki Haley for demonstrating more appeal to Democratic Party loyalists than me.”

Losses: American Samoa delivered a surprising – but largely negligible – defeat for the incumbent, by little-known candidate Jason Palmer. The unincorporated territory does not provide electoral college votes but does have a handful of delegates to influence the primary contest. This may seem an inconsequential setback, however, it impacts the narrative of the Biden campaign going forward. Prior to the upset, Team Biden could have claimed a clean sweep.

Danger Signs: Of significant consequence was a strong showing for “uncommitted” on the primary ballot. This option was available in seven states – most importantly Minnesota, where almost 20% of Democrat voters chose to send a warning to President Biden. Last week, around 100,000 Michigan voters (13%) also joined this bandwagon to express their dissatisfaction with his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Biden won Minnesota by seven points in 2020, so the state is considered safe Democrat territory. But it still poses a unique problem. If Joe Biden continues to support Israel, he could see small but significant pockets of pro-Palestinian discontent topple his electoral hopes. The 2020 election came down to a few tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states. While the uncommitted voters will not switch to Trump, they may not have the enthusiasm to campaign for Biden, or even vote for him in November. Apathy is an election killer and margins are what matter.

Haley Performs Both Better and Worse

The question on everyone’s lips today is whether Nikki Haley will stay in the race. As the totals rolled in, she was unusually tight-lipped, and not pursuing her now-trademark move of spinning a success out of a loss. Is she perhaps preparing to drop out with a dignified exit? It seems only her hairdresser knows, and perhaps insider sources at Fox. The outlet reports:

“The former two-term South Carolina governor who later served as U.N. ambassador in former President Donald Trump’s administration is expected to say Wednesday morning that she is suspending her campaign for the GOP nomination, but she is not immediately expected to endorse Trump.”

Wins: Nikki Haley managed to secure her first state primary – hot on the heels of her win in Washington, DC – by claiming Vermont. Along with Virginia, the Green Mountain State was Haley’s best shot at getting on the scoreboard as both states have open primaries in which voters can take part in whichever party’s primary they choose. Taking Vermont from Trump exposes a weakness on the former president’s left flank. It suggests that although he remains strong among committed GOP voters, pulling in independents – and even flipping some 2020 Democrats – could be an insurmountable hurdle.

Losses: Her success, however, almost certainly came courtesy of Democrat voters who will not be backing a Republican candidate in November. In the 2020 Democratic Party primary, more than 150,000 votes were cast; yesterday, there were just 63,000. For the GOP in 2020, just 38,000 primary ballots were cast; in 2016, that figure was roughly 55,000. Yesterday, there were more than 72,000 ballots. These figures suggest that Haley’s win had little to do with Republican support.

Danger Zones: Haley’s determination to take on Trump could result in her party losing the presidential election. Her attacks against her erstwhile GOP ally have been rather effective – so effective, in fact, that each barb has become a talking point for the Biden-friendly Fourth Estate and even the Biden 2024 campaign. If she pulls out of the race today, this would be another win for Trump and one that he will undoubtedly use to begin his presidential campaign in earnest.

A Two-Horse Race?

By any metric, Super Tuesday was a decisive win for Joe Biden and Donald Trump; they will – barring any unforeseen oddities – be refighting the 2020 election. But this time, they both have records to defend, and the state of the nation is a very different arena.

Other Republican and Democrat challengers will soon see the writing on the wall and shut down their respective campaigns, leaving only the third-party candidates ready to take on the top dogs; and they are not without teeth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling an average of almost 13% nationally – and although he is only on the ballot in a couple of states so far, there’s a lot of chatter about him teaming up with the Libertarian Party. This could give him access to all 50 states.

Super Tuesday is over for another four years, but the reverberations will shape party politics for the next eight months. Trump and Biden will spend the intervening time sharpening their attacks and making their cases, but in the end, it’s the voters who will decide; and yesterday’s contest provided some unique clues as to who they will eventually support.

 

Read More From Mark Angelides

The Most Important Result from Super Tuesday

March 6, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Since there was not a Reagan-type candidate in the race, I did not pay any attention to the presidential primary contests yesterday.

Instead, I was focused on state legislative races in Texas. There was a concerted effort to replace 21 Republicans who sided with the education establishment during a battle over school choice last year.

The good news is that five of those Republicans didn’t run for reelection and at least four of them will be replaced with supporters of school choice. And it may be five based on the upcoming results of a run-off election.

The better news, though, is that many of the pro-establishment GOPers who ran for reelection were defeated yesterday. In some cases, decisively.

And in other cases, they will probably lose their run-off elections.

Here are some headline results, as shared by Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children.

These results are very good for two reasons.

• First, it almost certainly means school choice will become law in Texas next year. Proponents thought they needed to win six races, and that’s already happened.
• Second, the Texas results send a big message to Republican lawmakers in other states where school choice is on the agenda. Simply stated, if you side with union money over student opportunity, you may lose your seat (same thing happened in Iowa in 2022, leading to school choice in 2023).

I’ll close by noting that Texas GOP voters also were asked their opinion on school choice yesterday. Here are the results.

No wonder school choice is going from fantasy to reality.

P.S. One of my hopes for 2024 already has partly materialized.

Super Tuesday: An End and a Beginning

The gladiators Trump and Biden are prepared to commence their final duel.

by Tim Donner | Mar 5, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

 Ordinarily, the focus of Super Tuesday’s bevy of contests stretching across the entire national map is the horserace: who is up, who is down, who needs to win and where, and how the race might look once the night is over. But, this time around, with the two most recognizable figures in the land all but certain to become their parties’ nominees and a rematch of 2020 in the offing, there is little drama surrounding the actual outcome of the 15 primaries set for today.

But that doesn’t mean this day will be inconsequential.

(Image credit: Ballotpedia)

From north to south, east to west, more voters will cast ballots today than at any time other than the general election itself. With more than one-third of the 2,429 delegates to the GOP Convention and a similar percentage of Democratic party delegates up for grabs, and the results all but baked-in at this point, the focus will likely turn to the relative turnout numbers between Trump and Biden. This will speak to the crucial factor of enthusiasm, yet another drag on dispirited Democrats.

Voters will go to the polls in large states like California and Texas, relatively large states including Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Colorado; medium-sized states including Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, plus the low-population states of Vermont and Alaska – along with American Samoa. Of all the states voting, only North Carolina had been considered a 2024 battleground state, but it has now been put in the Trump column after he amassed as much as double-digit leads over Biden in polling of the Tar Heel State.

Of course, Democrats will do the expected and deliver large margins for Joe Biden in every race today. The White House and Democratic National Committee did their job of protecting the incumbent by driving out any hint of serious intra-party opposition. And Trump, way ahead in virtually every state voting this Super Tuesday, will deliver another beatdown on Nikki Haley, whose continued presence in the race despite one landslide loss after another, will likely come to an end even as she continues to raise serious money – $12 million in February alone. The political future of the 52-year-old former governor of South Carolina and UN ambassador under Trump will rest on how she handles her inevitable exit. If she explicitly endorses her former boss, resists the temptation to join the No Labels movement, and promises to actively campaign for Trump, her future in the party could still be bright. But if she goes rogue, all bets are off. At the same time, it is also true that, if Trump loses in November, she will likely be at the forefront of a reset of Trump’s MAGA agenda and a return to a more traditional form of conservatism or neoconservatism in the GOP.

The Senate primary in California today to replace the late Dianne Feinstein also holds interest. Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee are on the ballot along with former LA Dodgers star Steve Garvey, a Republican who has been leading the 4-way race to date. Under the state’s open primary system, candidates from both parties are presented on the same ballot. The top two finishers – regardless of party – will face each other in a November runoff for all the marbles. A win by Garvey in the bluest of blue states would be a portent of one miserable night for the left.

The Real Story of Super Tuesday 2024

The narrative you will hear once the Super Tuesday results are in will transcend the likely impending exit of Ms. Haley, who kind of gave it away by not even scheduling a campaign event on Monday, one day before Super Tuesday. With a dozen or more victories seemingly in the bag for both Trump and Biden, the real story of Super Tuesday is that it will effectively signal the end of primary season – the remaining contests will be merely pro forma – and the start of what promises to be the most tumultuous general election campaign we have ever witnessed. And that includes 2016 and 2020.

The general election campaign essentially kicks off starting Wednesday, and the first salvo will undoubtedly come from Biden – dressed up in the usual official language – in his State of the Union address two days hence, on March 7. And then off we go.

While Trump could credibly base his entire campaign around the shortcomings of Biden, it is the reverse for the current occupant of the White House. Left with no other choice, Biden will certainly resort to a scorched-earth campaign after repeatedly trying and failing to overcome his glaring deficits in every area except abortion. In an inexplicable act of political malpractice, he was told to start touting “Bidenomics,” inventing a definition for his unpopular economic policies, thus making him even easier to attack. He has all but bribed young voters, whose support for him dropped precipitously, with student loan forgiveness during an election year. He has been unable to repackage his disastrous record at the southern border or on the international stage, defined by the trio of disasters in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has now resumed beheadings; Ukraine, a grinding, explosively divisive world crisis; and the increasingly insoluble Israel-Hamas war, which continues unabated, chopping off a significant chunk of his support among progressives.

If that wasn’t enough, public perception of his neurological condition, if not his age, will continue to haunt him right up to November 5. They can make him sit instead of stand, deliver remarks strictly by teleprompter and do nothing beyond the minimum. But he faces a huge conundrum: In order to come back and win, he must get out more in front of the electorate to overcome the image of a doddering old man with a poor memory. But if he does so, there is a very real risk of exacerbating an already unfixable problem.

At the same time, one suspects that, should Biden try to revive his infamous statement in 2020 that if you are black and don’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black,” it would fall on deaf ears at best. This time, he is hemorrhaging with his baseline black and brown voters, who at this point should be safely in the Democrat column. Instead, he is falling through the floor among both groups. But perhaps the ultimate gut punch is The New York Times reporting that he has dropped into a tie with Trump among women, whose abandonment of Trump in large numbers last time was decisive in handing Biden the keys to the White House.

Biden will resort to the only argument he has left to make, and it’s the same one he has intoned from the moment his campaign was rescued in the 2020 primaries: that Trump’s return to the White House would signal the end of democracy as we know it and the consequent rise of a full-on dictatorship. But that’s not all. At the same time, panicked Democrats have, according to multiple sources, explicitly threatened and vowed to destroy challenger Dean Phillips, and any Democrat who cavorts with the No Labels movement. They have already marginalized a legacy Democrat , Robert F. Kennedy Jr., refusing even Secret Service protection for the scion of a family ripped apart by two assassinations. These are not the actions of a party confident of victory.

After a season of foregone conclusions, the real race for the White House, the one so many people have expected but dreaded, begins this Super Tuesday. It will be a showdown for the ages, with the outcome affirming a vision radically different than the alternative, and the country waiting anxiously to see if it will get a return to the days of America First, or the continued march of a hard left that has swallowed up one institution after another, now including the Democratic Party. And despite the best efforts of Democrats to use the legal system to throw Donald Trump into a cage, it will in the end be decided as it should, by the American people choosing between opposite visions of the future.

Read More From Tim Donner

Well, Super Tuesday is Done! Who Else is Done?

By Rich Kozlovich Updated, March 4, 2020 @ 1:56 PM

Going into Super Tuesday there was a lot of talk that Bernie Sanders was a shoo-in, and that Biden was toast. I thought this was Biden's swan song, even after his huge win in South Carolina, where Bernie was crushed. It appeared to me the Democrat party was going to have to rig something to prevent that, possibly with Bloomberg.

Apparently not!

As we know, prediction is really hard, especially when it involves the future. As it turns out, it appears the Democrat party rank and file were as concerned about a Bernie nomination as the back room boys who run the party.

Biden laughingly claims he will create a more "affable" America. Really? And just how can he do that? Do what Bernie wants and put Trump supporters and all conservatives in training camps? That's what the Chinese communists called concentration camps.

Biden is a dumbler. He's dumb and he's a bumbler. He's clearly losing is ability to grasp reality, but that's always been a problem for him.

And Delaware kept sending him back to Washington every six years.

What's wrong with the minds of America's Northeasterners?

Will this be the end of Bernie? He's becoming unhinged with his condemnation of Israel; his embrace of radical Islamists; his love of Castro and all the other communist monsters of the 20th century and his hate for Trump and Trump supporters, and his desire to strip the wealth from the rich, which means everyone eventually.

Russia, China, Cuba, N. Korea, Venezuela - all examples of admiration by Bernie’s, but all of them are perfect examples of what it means when socialists take over a country. Fascism and Communism are two sides of the same coin, and both lead to tyranny.

And Vermont kept sending him back to Washington, first as House member and then the Senate.

What's wrong with the minds of America's Northeasterners?  

Here are the numbers. Crazy Joe leads with 387 delegates versus Comrade Bernie with 356. It looks like Crazy Joe just might end up with a plurality in Milwaukee. Who will Buttigieg and Klobuchar support? Initially I though Buttigieg would go to Bernie and Klobuchar to Biden. It seems more likely now they'll both support Biden, looking out for their own future interests, and possible positions in a Biden administration.

That leaves Warren and Bloomberg. Will they drop out soon?

(Update:  After blowing a billion dollars, Bloomberg is out and is endorsing Joe Biden. Does that mean he gets Bloomberg's 44 delagates?  RK) 

Warren's running out of money, and it appears the woman so many wanted to run against Hillary turns out to be an even worse campaigner than was Hillary.  As for Bloomberg is really unpopular.  He has a lot of history that's coming back to haunt him, which makes me wonder how someone could be so smart as to become a billionaire but so dumb to think he could run for the presidency with his history.

Now the Democrat leadership doesn’t need Bloomberg as an emergency escape hatch against Bernie, so I think he’s toast. I think they'll both drop out soon and support Biden in hopes he's elected and they'll be rewarded in a Biden administration.

I think the whole bunch of them are delusional about winning the presidency, holding the House and taking over the Senate. But, that's politics, but one thing is clear - this answers my question - Will Super Tuesday Leave Democrats With Dumbler and Dodo?

Will Super Tuesday Leave Democrats With Dumbler and Dodo?

By Rich Kozlovich

On March 1, 2020 Monica Showalter published her article, Fool and his money: Good riddance, Tom Steyer, saying:

The poor wretched monomaniac of greenie virtue now goes the way of Jay Inslee, the qualified, but leftist, governor of Washington state who, like Steyer, was also global warming bore and washed out because of it. You'd think maybe Steyer would have noticed how unimportant this 'sky is falling' greenie cause was with voters by that point, but nope, Steyer continued to sell that snake oil to voters, thinking a barrage of television ads would make them catch on. He never had a clue.

Well, one more down and Buttigieg is about to follow, and the only question about him is, who will get his bounce?  I think Sanders. 

Who will be next? Clearly Klobuchar is running out of money and she had to cancel her Minnesota rally because black protesters jumped on stage to demand she drop out because of a black teen who was sentenced to life in prison for some crime, that we have to assume he committed, while she was the prosecutor.

But what's having actually committed a serious crime have to do with being Woke? Right?

However, this helps demonstrate she has no base to rely on, and black race baiters will run this into the ground. Will she stick around until Super Tuesday on March third? Who knows, but after March third, she's done, and so too will be Warren, who's being dropped like a hot coal for her lack of integrity. Imagine integrity being a factor in this party and amongst this crowd!

As for Bloomberg, he's spent millions of his own money to keep in this race, as did Steyer. But like Steyer, he has no message and has shown he has the moral foundation of quicksand.  He clearly will betray whomever he has to betray, and will pander to whomever he has to pander to, and say what he has to say. He absolutely looks pathetic to Democrat voters.

Bidden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Warren and Sanders are equally guilty of that also, but that’s what Democrat politicians do. That’s their bailiwick. That's what's expected of them. That’s their SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. But Bloomberg is a reconstituted Republican who did things the Democrats condemned, and now he's sooooo sorry he did them. He's toast, and even if he stays in the race, he will not be in any more debates if there are any. Unless of course the Democrats change the rules. Look for that.

That leaves Biden and Sanders after Super Tuesday. A dumbler and a dodo.

Both are dumb as dirt, but Biden is constantly bumbling and babbling, clearly unaware of what he’s saying or even understands what he's talking about.  Making up stories that can easily be exposed as untrue. Does he believe them?  I think he does. Does anyone besides me think that’s scary? That a man who is clearly suffering from some kind of mental disorder is the preferred pick of the Democrat leadership to become President of the United States?  Then again, look at the field! 

The other is also dumb as dirt, and a hypocritical communist lunatic who wants to destroy capitalism and replace it with what exists in North Korea or Venezuela.

Even George Bush the first could have beaten them, and maybe even John McCain could have beaten them.  Although, in the case of either of them, it might have been close, but even with the Democrat lock of voter fraud I think they still could have beaten dumbler and dodo.

Their position on the national debt is to expand it beyond the galactic barrier in order to expand government, raise taxes and take total and complete control over every American's life. From cradle to the grave. And over forty percent of the voting public thinks that's okay.  That's scary.  That is if we believe in polls.  

One more thing. From what I can tell, all of these people, with the possible exception of Bernie, are running out of money, and it’s my understanding that includes Biden. Where does it go from here? I had thought this would become a brokered convention, but that might not be the case. However, if it looks like Bernie is going to run away with this, the Democrats will change the rules in some corrupt way to offset anything Bernie has gained that will give him the nomination.

Talk about Schadenfreude. It is such a delightful sin.

One more, one more thing.  This election will end the backroom boys hold on the Democrat party. Soros and his ilk have poured a lot of money into the far left and their organized efforts to take over the party.  It will become unrecognizable over the next five years.

This election will seal the Democrat party's fate.