Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden won according to the preliminary results on the primary election day called Super Tuesday, when registered voters of the parties decided on the presidential candidates in about 15 states of the United States.
Among the Republicans, Donald Trump won all but one exception in the race for the presidential nomination with Nikki Haley. Incumbent Joe Biden also suffered a single-seat defeat in the Democratic primary.
In the Republican primary, Trump won more than expected in the eastern state of Virginia, where forecasts showed a chance for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to win. According to an almost complete summary of the votes, Trump ended up with 63 percent of the vote and Haley with 34 percent.
In the state of Colorado, Trump achieved more than 60 percent support over Haley, who won about a third of the vote. In the state of Colorado, it was not certain until Monday whether the votes cast for Trump could be taken into account, as the state's highest court excluded the former president from running, and this decision was overturned by the federal supreme court. Voting took the longest in the states of California, Alaska and Utah in the western part of the country, so the results from these places will come later.
In the other states where Super Tuesday primaries were held, Donald Trump won by a landslide, including Alabama, Texas, Minnesota, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Maine.
Nikki Haley won the only victory in the northeastern state of Vermont, where she received 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Donald Trump.
Trump thanked for the support and called Election Day a great day at an event awaiting the results of the election in Florida. In his speech, he called the solution to the border security crisis and closing the borders to illegal immigrants the most important task facing the country. In addition, he emphasized that the United States needs to act in the Middle East in order to create world security, which, in his opinion, is not happening during the presidency of Joe Biden.
Haley has not indicated in advance that she will evaluate the results in a public speech after Super Tuesday, but is expected to announce her withdrawal from the presidential race soon.
As a result of Tuesday's primaries, according to preliminary totals, the number of delegates for presidential candidate Donald Trump exceeds a thousand. The final summary will be released on Wednesday.
To win the presidential nomination, 1,215 delegate votes are needed, which means an absolute majority at the national presidential nominating convention of the Republican Party, which will be held in mid-July.
In the Democratic primaries, Joe Biden also won in every state, but according to preliminary reports, he lost to his challenger at the nomination meeting held on the Pacific island of the United States, American Samoa. It was the first defeat of an incumbent in the 2024 primaries.
Based on customary law, when the incumbent president runs for re-election, no potential candidate within his party competes against him. This is what happened this year as well, as Joe Biden's challenger is a nationally little-known congressman, Dean Phillips, and a writer from California, Marianne Williamson.
At the same time, it is a warning for the incumbent president that a so-called "noncommitted/uncommitted/no preference" voter group has appeared among the Democratic voters, which does not support any candidate. This group makes up more than 10 percent of the Democratic electorate in several states, but in Minnesota it represented a fifth of the Democrats who showed up in the primary.
Joe Biden did not evaluate the results of the primary election in a public speech on Tuesday evening, issuing a statement according to which the re-election of Donald Trump as president would mean a return to "chaos, division and darkness".
The American primary election race continues on Tuesday, March 12 in the state of Georgia, and on Friday, March 8, Republican voters living in American Samoa, which belongs to the United States, will choose who they want as the presidential candidate in the November elections at a nomination meeting.
Featured image: MTI/EPA/George Frey
