President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have each earned enough delegates to become their parties’ likely presidential nominees, setting up a rematch in November’s general election.
Biden attained the key amount by allocating delegates from Georgia, a battleground state critical to his 2020 general election triumph. Trump also earned the Republican nomination by winning the Washington State primary.
Biden and Trump won nearly every contest in the presidential nominating calendar so far, but the important threshold of winning a majority of delegates to the party conventions this summer has finally been met. Tuesday’s contests included primaries in Georgia, a key swing state for both parties, and Washington State and Mississippi.
Throughout the process, Trump has been a de facto incumbent, holding off several challengers while ceding a meaningful share of votes to former S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley.
Biden did not face serious opposition in the primaries, but opposition to his policies around Israel and Gaza has led to some delegates going “uncommitted.”
In Biden’s response to securing the nomination earlier tonight, he took a swipe at his expected challenger, front-runner Donald Trump.
Tuesday’s results cleared the way for a 2024 general election campaign that, at just under eight months, is set to be one of the longest in modern American history and will be the country’s first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years.
Already, Trump and Biden have shifted their focus away from the primaries. With the president facing no significant challengers, Biden’s campaign speeches emphasised his record and Trump poses the danger he believes.
In a statement, Mr. Biden said he was honoured that Democratic voters “have put their faith in me once again to lead our party—and our country—in a moment when the threat Trump poses is greater than ever.”
Even as Trump worked to dispatch his Republican rivals, his campaign speeches focused on his criticisms of Biden and his insistence that the primary needed to end swiftly so that his party could focus its energy and resources on November.
In a video posted on social media by his campaign after he clinched the nomination, Trump called Tuesday a “great day of victory,” but said it was immediately time to focus on defeating Mr. Biden in November. “I want to thank everybody, but much more importantly, we have to get to work to beat Joe Biden,” he said.
Neither man will be formally selected until his party’s conventions this summer. But Mr. Biden has already been using the political and financial apparatus of the Democratic National Committee. And last week, the Trump campaign effectively took over the Republican National Committee, imposing mass layoffs on Monday as it reshapes the party’s operations.
That Trump was able to lock up the Republican nomination fairly quickly demonstrates the grasp he has kept on the party and his conservative base, despite his 2020 loss and failed efforts to overturn it; a string of disappointing midterm losses by candidates he backed; and his 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.
The former president won nearly every nominating contest that awarded delegates, with Ms. Haley scoring wins in only Vermont and Washington, D.C., where she became the first woman ever to win a Republican presidential primary or caucus.
But Trump’s swift path to the nomination also reflects a backroom effort by him and his political team to bend rules around primaries and delegates in his favour. The rules that states use to award delegates to particular candidates are decided by state party officials, and Trump and his advisers built relationships with those officials to ease his path.
In one critical example, Trump’s campaign shaped California’s rules, leading party officials to adopt a “winner take all” system that would award the state’s delegates to a candidate who swept 50 per cent of the vote statewide. That threshold favoured Mr. Trump, the only candidate polling at that level there.
Trump ultimately won California’s primary last week, a major moment in the delegate race. California’s 169 delegates gave him 14 per cent of the 1,215 delegates needed to win the nomination.
Similarly, Biden encountered minimal resistance during his ascent to the nomination, securing victory in every contest by significant margins. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and environmental lawyer, dropped out of the Democratic nominating contest to run independently. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help guru Marianne Williamson never attracted more than a fraction of the vote.
Both men’s strengths in their primaries may belie weaknesses within their coalitions that could pose difficulty for them in November, particularly given that the 2020 election was decided by narrow margins in just a handful of states.
In some places where Trump won the Republican contests convincingly, he still performed comparatively weaker with voters in suburban areas and those who identify as moderates or independents. Such groups, whose support Mr. Trump lost in 2020, may be crucial in tightly contested battleground states.
Biden, for his part, faced a campaign in several primary states that urged voters to protest his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza by voting “uncommitted.” Losing the support of those voters in the fall could weaken the coalition that helped Mr. Biden oust Mr. Trump in 2020.
During Biden’s first term, voters have questioned his age and his record, even as economic indicators improve. The president has shown weakness with young people and Black and Hispanic voters, key groups in the coalition that powered him to victory last time around.
A majority of Americans view Biden unfavourably, which is a precarious position for a president seeking re-election—although Trump is also in this position.
Both campaigns have argued that voters who backed them in previous years will return to them as the choice crystallizes.
Biden and his allied groups also have a significant financial advantage over Mr. Trump, whose legal bills are taking a toll.
With Tuesday’s victories, Trump has locked up the nomination before any of his four criminal cases have proceeded to trial. His Manhattan criminal case, which stems from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016, is set to go to trial on March 25 and is expected to last six weeks.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had unsuccessfully argued that the timing would interfere with his presidential campaign, citing the primary calendar as one reason.
More recently, Trump’s legal team made a desperate attempt to postpone the trial before it began. In court papers made public on Monday, his lawyers argued that the trial should not take place until the Supreme Court has decided whether Trump is immune from prosecution in his Washington criminal case, which involves accusations that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.
The judge in the New York case, Juan M. Merchan, is unlikely to grant the request.
