I’m not going to lie to you to get more clicks: yesterday was, in many ways, the most boring Super Tuesday in history. The day emerged in roughly its modern form in 1984, when a group of states decided that making their primaries part of the same huge media circus would increase their importance and influence over the final nominations. It reached its apogee in 2008, when over half of the delegates were awarded in what the media dubbed “Giga Tuesday” and “The Tuesday of Destiny”. Subsequent Super Tuesdays have been slightly less Giga, but they have all featured at least one genuinely competitive race. By contrast, we went into yesterday already knowing which candidate is going to win both of the major party primaries. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was a total snooze fest. I’m here to tell you it wasn’t, and here’s why:
First, the easy stuff: Biden and Trump both smashed their way to victory. Even though 70% of Americans say that this isn’t the choice they want in November, this is the choice that they’re going to get. Nikki Haley did finally manage to win a state - Vermont - but she failed to change the fundamental dynamics of her race against Trump. Biden triumphed everywhere except for American Samoa, which doesn’t have any Electoral College delegates and in which only 91 people took part in the Democratic caucus (thanks for supporting democracy, guys!).
But both Biden and Trump have big problems in their future. You can sum these problems up by looking at two states: Virginia and Minnesota.
In Virginia, Trump won the primary. But he struggled in suburban and better-educated parts of the state - in the DC suburbs of Fairfax County, in Richmond, in Charlottesville, and in the Charlottesville suburbs of Albemarle County. Virginia is kind of a blue state now - Republicans haven’t won it since 2004 - but problems in these kinds of areas suggest that Trump has not won back the swing voters who deserted him in 2020. Losses to Haley in Denver and Boulder, Colorado suggest the same thing.
It’s too early to say how much of a serious barrier this is to Trump winning in November, but it certainly isn’t good. Suburban defections helped sink him in Georgia and midwestern swing states in 2020. But Trump isn’t really acting like he feels the need to perform the proverbial “pivot” and start appealing to the center, even though he could easily do this without the risk of losing the primary to Haley. You have to ask yourself what could happen between now and November to bring these disaffected swing voters back home to the GOP. My guess is that neither Trump appearing in court on charges of trying to overthrow American democracy nor Trump engaging in Hitlerian rhetoric about migrants “poisoning the blood” of America are going to do it.
Biden’s problems are different. Look at Minnesota. Most of the midwest has become redder over time, transforming it into the “swing region” which decides the presidential election. While that has been happening, Minnesota has remained pretty reliably blue. It contains a large number of whites without college degrees - Trump’s usual base - but the state has a long tradition of progressive politics in rural areas which has inoculated it somewhat against Trump’s appeal. It also has a diverse and growing metro area in the Twin Cities, plus former GOP-aligned suburbs that Trump has repelled and pushed into the Democratic camp.
(It’s also the birthplace of the greatest band of all time, The Hold Steady, but that’s for another post).
Yesterday, Minnesota sent the biggest warning sign to Biden. ‘Uncommitted’ - the anti-Biden protest movement fueled by the war in Gaza - received about 19% of the vote there. That’s an even greater share than the movement received in Michigan, and it suggests that ‘Uncommitted’ is growing its coalition. There’s a large Somali-American presence in the Twin Cities, but Blacks only make up 7% of the population of the state. ‘Uncommitted’ was only able to get to 19% in Minnesota by drawing on other groups - particularly young voters and suburban women.
I remain skeptical that ‘Uncomitted’ itself will have a big impact in November, when the war in Gaza will likely be over and the specter of Trump will be uncomfortably close on the horizon. But this is a political problem that Biden desperately needs to defuse, because reduced enthusiasm and turnout among younger voters and African-Americans could really harm him in the Midwest in November.
Some other stuff happened yesterday too. Progressive Katie Porter lost the California Senate primary to Adam Schiff, who was the House of Representative’s lead prosecutor during the first Trump impeachment. Schiff won by placing Trump front and center in his campaign, in what turned out to be an interesting signal about the future of the Democratic Party. Even as Biden accumulates political wounds, Bidenism - a centrist defense of American democracy which places appealing to swing voters at its core - still seems to be on the march, and Progressives are struggling to counter it.
Two ballot measures in San Francisco sent a similar signal. Proposals championed by Mayor London Breed to expand police powers and require drug testing for welfare recipients sailed to victory, suggesting that the law-and-order debate is moving ever rightward. This, I repeat, is in deep-blue San Francisco. If the summer of 2020 was a revolution which gave birth to “Defund the police” and “the Great Awokening”, we now seem to be in that revolution’s period of thermidorian reaction.
One final piece of news, which you may have missed because it’s not strictly Super Tuesday news. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced that she won’t seek re-relection as an independent, clearing the way for Democrat Ruben Gallego to take on pro-Trump maniac Kari Lake. This was the right thing for Sinema to do. Even though she often teamed up with Joe Manchin to be a centrist troublemaker, her situation was actually very different. Manchin represents a deeply red state which no other Democrat can win, and so his centrist troublemaking made sense. Sinema, on the other hand, was doing Manchin-style politics in a swing state while polling worse than a generic Democratic replacement. Going was the right thing to do, and I’m glad she got there in the end.