After winning their primaries on Tuesday night, President Biden and former President Donald Trump are on track for a November election rematch.
According to CBS News, former President Donald Trump will be the presumptive Republican contender in 2024 after winning the Washington primary and gathering the 1,125 delegates required to secure the GOP candidature. CBS News forecasts he will win the Georgia and Mississippi primaries that day.
In a video distributed on social media by the Trump campaign, Trump referred to it as a “wonderful day of victory” but added, “We’re not going to take time to celebrate. “We’ll celebrate in eight months when the election is over.”
President Biden secured the Democratic Party’s nomination earlier Tuesday. CBS News estimated that he would win in Washington, Georgia, and Mississippi.
With these victories and the nominations finalised, this will be one of contemporary history’s most extended general election campaigns. There are 238 days until November 5, the presidential election day.
Trump’s route to the nomination has taken an unusual turn, as he is the only former president in history to be charged criminally.
Since commencing his re-election campaign in November 2022, Trump has maintained a dominating poll lead over all primary challengers. And those polls weren’t even close: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came within 15 points of Trump in a Fox News survey issued in February 2023, far before DeSantis entered the campaign.
Then Trump was indicted in four distinct criminal cases, facing 91 felony charges. With each indictment, Trump’s primary poll ratings improved, and he was able to raise millions of dollars from perceived efforts to target the previous president unfairly.
With a huge war chest of cash and a commanding lead in the polls, Trump could dismiss his primary opponents, calling the race over before it began. He refused to participate in any Republican National Committee-sponsored debates or sign a vow to support the party’s eventual nominee.
Trump was likewise rarely seen on the campaign road. The former president campaigned in Iowa only 26 times this cycle, whereas Gov. DeSantis visited all 99 counties in the Hawkeye State.
Trump ultimately won the Iowa caucus by the greatest margin of any Republican history, defeating his opponents by 51%.
The former president dominated the early nominating contests, winning all but two primaries. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the last Republican to face Trump before withdrawing the day after Super Tuesday, only won two GOP primaries: Vermont and Washington, D.C.
Trump is now publicly focusing on Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020 by flipping key battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
According to current polling, Trump leads Biden in a head-to-head matchup. A CBS News poll issued earlier in March found Trump with his highest lead yet, 52% to 48% among potential voters.
Biden’s re-election campaign is beginning.
It was more of a formality for Mr. Biden to secure the Democratic candidacy.
The incumbent president faced two longshot challengers, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson, but has won every Democratic primary and caucus so far (except in American Samoa, where he split delegates with venture capitalist Jason Palmer, despite Palmer winning more of the 91 votes cast).
A movement to vote “uncommitted” on several state ballots to oppose Mr. Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war has become the second highest vote-getter in various states (Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Hawaii), despite a significant difference between the president and this choice.
The modified calendar Mr. Biden pushed for in 2022 put South Carolina first, then Nevada and Michigan, on his way to 1,968 delegates.
With its “first in the nation” legislation, New Hampshire was officially the first state to host a Democratic nominating process. While the president’s name was not on the ballot and no delegates were awarded due to the state violating the DNC’s new rules, Mr. Biden won by write-in vote.
The president and his campaign have entered full general election gear since his State of the Union speech last Thursday.
He has increased his battleground state travel, with plans to visit Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan this month. Vice President Kamala Harris was in Arizona and Nevada over the weekend.
The campaign announced a $30 million ad buy over the next six weeks, with the first ad addressing concerns about the president’s age of 81. The campaign hopes to build 100 additional offices in battleground states this month and hire 350 new employees.
According to campaign finance records combined with the DNC, Mr. Biden’s significant financial advantage, which nearly doubles Mr. Trump’s war chest at over $130 million, highlights the campaign’s shift to a general election mode.
However, national and battleground state polling shows that the incumbent president remains in a close race with his 2020 opponent, partly due to decreasing excitement among his winning Democratic coalition in 2020.
Mr. Biden has already begun highlighting his differences with President Trump in his campaign. He repeatedly mentioned “my predecessor” in his State of the Union address and has continued to criticize Trump on the campaign trail.
“Donald Trump serves a distinct constituency. Here’s the person starting his general election campaign up the road from Marjorie Taylor Greene. “It can tell you a lot about a person he associates with,” Mr. Biden remarked at a campaign rally in Atlanta on Saturday.
Trump responds to collecting enough delegates to win the GOP nomination: “This was a great day of victory.”
Former President Donald Trump hailed Tuesday as a “great day of victory” after securing enough delegates for the Republican presidential candidacy.
“Today was a tremendous day of victory. Last week was wonderful—Super Tuesday—but now we have to get back to work because we have the worst president in the history of this country,” Trump remarked, adding that Biden “must be defeated.”
Trump received the 1,215 delegates required through a distribution of delegates from Washington State.
“We will not take time to celebrate. We’ll celebrate in eight months when the election is over. “November 5, I believe, will go down as the most important day in the history of our country,” Trump said in a video posted by his campaign on X.
This July, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump will get his formal nomination. Trump also addressed some of his traditional campaign concerns, such as immigration and energy development.
