By Takuya Karube,
Donald Trump dominated on the most crucial day of the 2024 U.S. presidential primary calendar Tuesday, raising the likelihood of him clinching the Republican nomination as soon as next week and setting up a November showdown with his successor, Democrat Joe Biden.
On what is known as Super Tuesday, with a third of all delegates at stake, Trump trounced Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival for their party's nomination, making her path to capturing it virtually impossible.
But Haley managed to avoid being swept in all 15 contests by narrowly winning the small liberal-leaning state of Vermont.
Trump won delegate-rich California and Texas, as well as Massachusetts, Maine and Virginia, which are known for having more moderate, college-educated voters than other states where the Republican primaries or caucuses were held.
"This has been a day that we've been waiting for," Trump said in celebrating his landslide victory with supporters at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate. "November 5th is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country. We are going to take it."
Coming out of Super Tuesday, Trump won 1,051 delegates, compared with Haley's 86, as of around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, according to ABC News.
While Trump's recent victories have not secured him enough delegates to be deemed the presumptive nominee, he could clinch the nomination as early as next Tuesday, when Georgia holds its primary, according to projections from major U.S. media outlets.
In coast-to-coast contests for both the Democrats and Republicans, which also included Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, the spotlight was also on Haley's next move.
Trump's long-shot challenger has faced increasing pressure to drop out of the race, but she made no public appearances following the latest results.
Her campaign instead released a statement saying, "Today, in state after state, there remains a large block of Republican primary voters who are expressing deep concerns about Donald Trump."
"That is not the unity our party needs for success. Addressing those voters' concerns will make the Republican Party and America better," her spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said.
Ahead of Super Tuesday, Trump swept all except one of the first nine Republican contests since the primary season formally began in January.
Haley, a former South Carolina governor who served as U.N. ambassador under Trump, defeated him in the U.S. capital on Sunday, not only winning a nomination race for the first time but also becoming the first woman in U.S. history to win a Republican primary.
Still, Haley, 52, has struggled to slow Trump's momentum despite polls showing a majority of voters want an option other than the 77-year-old Trump and the 81-year-old Biden.
Despite 91 criminal charges against him, Trump also leads Biden in head-to-head races in some national polls and key battleground states.
As of Tuesday, Trump is leading Biden by 2 percentage points, 47.5 percent versus 45.5 percent, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, according to an average of national polling data by Real Clear Politics.
Super Tuesday came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump can remain on 2024 presidential primary ballots, reversing a decision by the state of Colorado's highest court to disqualify him over his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol.
The ruling gave Trump a significant legal victory, removing a potential hurdle for his bid to return to the White House.
At the Republican Party's national convention in July, a candidate will need at least 1,215 of the 2,429 delegates up for grabs to win its presidential nomination.
Biden, the oldest U.S. president ever elected, is all but certain to clinch the Democratic Party's nomination, although worries over his age persist.
In late February, his doctor said an annual physical examination found no new concerns, describing the president as a "healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male."
Biden is set to deliver the State of the Union speech on Thursday, hoping to build voter support for a second term.
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