Super Tuesday hints on November race

Is there anything to read in the tea leaves?

As expected, Donald J. Trump all but swept the Super Tuesday primaries. This leaves him with an estimated 995 delegates of the 1215 needed for nomination. Haley’s got 89. There’s not much of a story to tell there, but the world of party primaries and nominations doesn’t really match the reality of voting nationwide, or the state by state battlegrounds of a presidential general election. So looking ahead to November, is there anything we can read from Super Tuesday?

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Let’s start with Nikki Haley’s one victory: Vermont. Haley beat Trump by a mere 2,890 votes, or a mere 4%. Polling for Trump v. Biden in Vermont is sparse, but Biden is likely unassailable. Not much to learn there. Biden will win Vermont, and Trump was never going to win it, but the GOP still nearly broke for Trump. There’s really no part of the GOP that’s not under MAGA control.

Rounding out New England, Trump crushed Haley by over 23 points in bluest of blue Massachusetts, where Biden has a 20-plus point lead in general election polling. It’s surprising how Trumpy Massachusetts Republicans have become. Trump allies in the Bay State prototyped some of the methods being used to bombard local election officials with records requests. These efforts are now being rolled out in states like Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada in an attempt to challenge voter registrations and force a culling of the voter rolls in contested areas.

If Massachusetts tells us anything, it’s that Trump supporters are expecting a close election in November, and they’re not going to let a little thing like losing it stop them from pursuing victory by other means. They’re refining the legal mechanisms used so poorly in 2020. Expect this to be an issue in battleground states and even to the precinct level coming into the home stretch before Election Day.

On the other hand, Trump beat Haley 72.4% to 25.8% in Maine. The down easters are split like it’s two states: ME-1 is Trump by 20 points in November, and ME-1 is Biden by 8. All the pundits say Maine will split its electors, and it likely will.

Moving south, Virginia broke for Trump by 28.3 points, or 195,175 votes. FiveThirtyEight shows Biden ahead by 3-5 points in Virginia. It’s not considered a key battleground state, as Democrats all but swept the midterms, and Trump has never enjoyed a lead there. The only mildly interesting statistic is that Haley won both Alexandria (expected) and Charlottesville, home of UVA. Not only did she beat Trump in Charlottesville, she crushed him, taking 75.5% of the votes. She also won with 58% in Lexington, home of the super-conservative Washington & Lee University, and with 68% in Richmond, Virginia’s capital city. (Let me caveat that not all precincts have been counted, so totals might change, but 96% reporting gives me confidence.)

Virginia tells us that college cities are going to break against Trump, and this could give us some hints in battleground states that matter. This could be an important fact for the data wonks in both the Trump and Biden campaigns, but more for Biden.

Alabama tells us: an infinite regression of Trump. Arkansas, more of the same. If any of you readers know who David Stuckenberg is, and why he got 152 votes in Arkansas, only three less than Gov. Doug Burgum, let me know in the comments.

North Carolina handed Trump a 73.9% to 23.3% win over Haley. Trump leads by 8 to 10 points in the latest polling, and 5.7% in the RCP average. A true battleground. With 96% reporting, Trump won every single county, according to the results I’m seeing. Haley could not even take Mecklenburg County and the Charlotte metro area. That’s a surprise to me—it wasn’t even particularly close: Trump won (with 193 of 195 precincts reporting) by nearly 4,900 votes. My concern here is that the state polling might be less accurate than it appears. In November, the Tar Heels are likely to break for MAGA.

Tennessee is Trump country, period. As is Arkansas, where former Gov. Asa Hutchinson won less than 10,000 votes, and Trump won 205,331 votes. Haley did very poorly, capturing only 18.4% of the vote—less than North Carolina. Trump won every county in Arkansas.

Oklahoma handed Trump, from what I can see, his second biggest margin of victory of Super Tuesday, with 81.8% of the vote (after Alaska, where he won with 87.6%). Haley received only 15.9%. I don’t know why it’s surprising the Sooners are so MAGA—even more than Texas—but it is surprising to me.

Speaking of Texas, Trump romped, as expected. But in the FiveThirtyEight polling, Biden does surprisingly well in the Lone Star state, with Trump consistently leading by less than 10 points. Biden beats Haley in Texas, not that it matters. Texas might surprise us in November—it could be closer than things appear from the primary. But the tea leaves are not easy to read.

Colorado is going to Biden in November. But Haley did respectably there, taking 33.5% to Trump’s 63.3%. I thought maybe Haley’s Colorado share would beat her Massachusetts 36.8%, but it didn’t happen. Haley did best (besides Vermont) in Utah, taking 40.7% of the vote. Utah is showing Trump ahead by 10-13 points in latest polls, but like Texas, the tea leaves don’t leave a lot of confidence. Utah, like Tyrannosaurus in the side mirror, may be closer than it appears come November.

Now, the crown jewel: California. Trump won with 78.6% to Haley’s 17.9%. Biden leads comfortably by about 20 points in Trump v. Biden polling in the left coast state. It’s not a battleground. It does tell me that Trump has consolidated his GOP hold in blue states, which is the same thing I saw in Massachusetts. Again, David Stuckenberg was on the ballot and took 2,382 votes. Who is that?

My takeaways from Super Tuesday are that the GOP is the U.S.S. MAGA, and Trump is in the wheelhouse. November will be super close, electorally. We knew all that. And if Trump loses, prepare for a repeat of 2020, but with more violence, and potentially more chaos. But the tea leaves may be wrong.