Donald Trump’s landslide Super Tuesday win shows strengths — and weaknesses

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Donald Trump’s sweeping win of more than a dozen state primaries on Tuesday has all but secured his Republican nomination and a long-expected rematch with President Joe Biden in November.

Losing in just one state out of 15, Trump captured roughly three-quarters of all votes on Super Tuesday in a landslide that prompted the departure of his last remaining opponent, Nikki Haley.

Data from Super Tuesday’s elections, combined with the US census and other sources, sharpens our picture of Trump’s base. The former president clearly enjoys wide support among Republicans, but that varies among demographic groups — signalling potential problems for him in November.

As in past elections, Trump performed better in counties with lower levels of college education and those with lower household incomes, and worse as those metrics increased. He also tended to see more support in rural counties versus large metro areas, reminiscent of his voter base in 2020.

Similar to his first victory this primary season in Iowa, Trump’s support among Republicans on Super Tuesday trended towards places with higher populations of people older than 50, whereas he was less popular in areas with younger voters — another potential weakness in the general election. In 2020, voters under 30 favoured Biden by 24 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trump’s vote share also varied significantly with voters’ religious affiliation. For example, he was more heavily supported in counties with more white evangelical Protestants — who are clearly in thrall to the former president — and far less supported in counties with more unaffiliated or secular residents.

Regardless of the precise sources of Trump’s support, he did not take long to lock up the Republican party’s nomination for president. The 2024 primary season was one of the quickest is recent memory, effectively ending more than four months before the nominating convention this summer. In 2016, by contrast, he became the presumptive nominee in early May.

But Tuesday’s data do contain sore spots for the Republican candidate.

Throughout the primary season, for example, the only candidate to threaten Trump’s margins was himself. He has underperformed his pre-election polling averages in eight states out of the nine where a significant number of polls have been conducted, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracking, and the bulk of results tallied.

However, Trump’s allies argue surveys overestimated his support in the primaries because pollsters focused on likely Republican primary voters, without fully taking into account how many independents or Democrats might participate — as many states allow — and throw their weight behind Haley.

Primary election polls have high margins of error in general, but it is notable how many of these errors have gone in the same direction. The concrete implications for a general election eight months away, however, remain speculative.

Exit polls from six states have also revealed stark differences between Haley and Trump voters, including the former’s opposition to a federal abortion ban and rejection of Trump if he were convicted of a crime. These are gaps that the former president will have to bridge in the coming months — or potentially lose some Haley supporters to the Biden campaign.

“I think Trump tried to overthrow the American government in 2020,” Tony McMurtury, 79, told the Financial Times in South Carolina last month. He had planned to vote for Haley in the state’s primary.

“I am a Republican,” he added. But, “I would vote for Biden before I would Trump”.

Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington