US President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump are poised to move much closer to winning their party’s nominations during the biggest day of the primary campaign, setting up a historic rematch that many voters would rather not endure.
Super Tuesday elections are being held in 16 states and one territory – from Alaska and California to Vermont and Virginia. Hundreds of delegates are at stake, the biggest haul for either party on any single day.
While much of the focus is on the presidential race, there are also other important contests taking place.
California voters will choose candidates who will compete to fill the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein. The governor’s race will take shape in North Carolina, a state that both parties are fiercely contesting ahead of November. And in Los Angeles, a progressive prosecutor is attempting to fend off an intense re-election challenge in a race that could serve as a barometer of the politics of crime.
But the premier races centre on Mr Biden and Mr Trump. And in a dramatic departure from past Super Tuesdays, both the Democratic and Republican contests are effectively sealed this year.
The two men have easily repelled challengers in the opening rounds of the campaign and are in full command of their bids – despite polls making it clear that voters do not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race.
“We have to beat Biden – he is the worst president in history,” Mr Trump said on Tuesday on the Fox & Friends cable morning show.
Mr Biden countered with a pair of radio interviews aimed at shoring up his support among black voters, who helped anchor his 2020 coalition.
“If we lose this election, you’re going to be back with Donald Trump,” Mr Biden said on DeDe In The Morning hosted by DeDe McGuire. “The way he talks about, the way he acted, the way he has dealt with the African-American community, I think, has been shameful.”
A new AP-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll finds a majority of Americans do not think either Mr Biden or Mr Trump has the necessary mental acuity for the job.
“Both of them failed, in my opinion, to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Biden will be able to formally clinch their party’s nominations on Super Tuesday. The earliest either can become his party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Mr Trump and March 19 for Mr Biden.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Rather than barnstorming the states holding primaries, Mr Biden and Mr Trump held rival events last week along the US-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to restore Mr Trump to primary ballots following attempts to ban him for his role in helping spark the Capitol riot, Mr Trump pointed to the 91 criminal counts against him to accuse Mr Biden of weaponising the courts.
“Fight your fight yourself,” Mr Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.”
Mr Biden delivers the State of the Union address on Thursday, then will campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The president will defend policies responsible for “record job creation, the strongest economy in the world, increased wages and household wealth, and lower prescription drug and energy costs”, White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in a statement.
That is in contrast, Mr LaBolt continued, to Mr Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, which consists of “rewarding billionaires and corporations with tax breaks, taking away rights and freedoms, and undermining our democracy”.
Mr Biden’s campaign called extra attention to Mr Trump’s most provocative utterances on the campaign trail, like when he evoked Adolf Hitler in suggesting that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the US and said he would seek to serve as a dictator during his first day back in the White House.
Mr Trump recently told a gala for black conservatives that he believed African Americans empathised with his four criminal indictments, drawing a sharp rebuke from the Biden campaign and top Democrats around the country for comparing personal legal struggles to the historical injustices black people have faced in the US.
Mr Trump has nonetheless already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now has only one left: Nikki Haley, the former president’s onetime UN ambassador who was also twice elected governor of her home state of South Carolina.
Ms Haley has travelled across the country, visiting at least one Super Tuesday state almost daily for more than a week and arguing that her base of support – while far smaller than Mr Trump’s – suggests the former president will lose to Mr Biden.
“We can do better than two 80-year-old candidates for president,” Ms Haley said at a rally on Monday in the Houston suburbs.
Ms Haley has maintained strong fundraising and notched her first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, DC, a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans. Mr Trump tried to turn that victory into a loss for her overall campaign, scoffing that Ms Haley had been “crowned queen of the swamp”.
Though Mr Trump has dominated the early Republican primary calendar, his victories have shown vulnerabilities with some influential voter blocs, especially in college towns such as Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as in some areas with high concentrations of independents.
The slate on Tuesday also includes Minnesota, a state Mr Trump did not carry in his otherwise dominant Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for Ms Haley, he said, because the Republican party “needs a course correction”.
Mr De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he has never voted for Mr Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
Still, Ms Haley winning any of Super Tuesday’s contests would take an upset, and a Trump sweep would only intensify pressure on her to leave the race.
Mr Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls suggesting that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, do not want to see the 81-year-old running again.
The president’s easy Michigan primary win last week was spoiled slightly by an “uncommitted” campaign organised by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
While Mr Biden is the oldest president in US history, his re-election campaign argues that sceptics will come around once it is clear it will be him or Mr Trump in November.
Mr Trump is 77 and also faces questions about age that have been exacerbated by mistakes such as over the weekend when he mistakenly suggested he was running against Barack Obama.
That has not shaken Mr Trump’s ardent supporters’ faith in him.
“Trump would eat him up,” Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a weekend Trump rally in Virginia, said of a November rematch, adding that Mr Biden “would look like a fool up there”.
