On the menu today: Whether or not your state is holding its primaries today, I hope you have a Super Tuesday. By the end of the day, Donald Trump will be significantly closer to clinching the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Nikki Haley will scoop up some delegates here and there, and continue proving that anywhere from a quarter to 40 percent of Republicans (and yes, some independents and crossover Democratic voters) in each state don’t want to attend the Trump circus for a third straight cycle. Meanwhile, tough questions about whether Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and why it’s hard for an aged president to get credit for much of anything.
A Delegate Dilemma
Today, Republicans will vote in presidential primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. Republicans will also attend presidential-selection caucuses in Alaska and Utah. In total, 865 Republican delegates are up for grabs today. The Republican candidate needs 1,215 delegates out of 2,429 to win the nomination.
Right now, Trump has 276 delegates and Haley has 43, according to Green Papers. The nominal good news for Haley is that if Trump won all of today’s delegates, he would finish Super Tuesday with 1,141 delegates. So, while Trump can’t mathematically eliminate Haley today . . . he will get very close. Referring to Trump as the “presumptive nominee” or “de facto nominee” would not be premature.
Almost all of today’s states are “winner-take-most,” usually awarding three delegates for each congressional district won, with the remainder given to the statewide winner. (If you’re winning statewide, you’re going to win a bunch of congressional districts along the way.) So far, Haley has won South Carolina’s first congressional district and the District of Columbia.
This morning, Politico‘s Playbook newsletter writes, “Watch early returns from Vermont and Virginia, where polls close at 7 p.m. If Haley is not overperforming in these two states that don’t have partisan voter registration, she’s unlikely to make much of a splash anywhere else tonight.” That’s a reasonable enough assessment, but even with a better-than-expected performance, Haley may not get many delegates out of those “V” states.
In Vermont, if one candidate receives 50 percent or more of the statewide vote, that candidate receives all 17 delegates. There hasn’t been a ton of polling, but in late February, the University of New Hampshire survey had Trump at 61 percent and Haley at 31 percent. Trump has underperformed his polling numbers in some early contests, but Haley’s going to need a big turnout to keep Trump below 50 percent in the Green Mountain State.
In Virginia, “If one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote or only one candidate receives 15 percent or more of the vote in a congressional district, that candidate receives all 3 delegates. In each congressional district, if 2 or more candidates receive more than 15 percent of the vote, the highest vote getter receives 2 delegates and the next highest vote getter receives 1 delegate.” Haley will probably do well in some of northern Virginia’s suburban districts, and she may get some two-to-one splits elsewhere, but Trump will probably win most of the 48 delegates at stake. Note that the Roanoke College poll indicated a pretty close race statewide, with Trump at 51 percent and Haley at 43 percent.
Politico also lists Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, and Utah as “a few other states to keep an eye on if Haley is exceeding expectations.”
Maine’s rules are like Vermont’s: “If any one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, that contender receives all of Maine’s delegates.” Another UNH poll had Trump at 77 percent in Maine in mid February.
It’s a similar story in Massachusetts: “If a presidential candidate receives a majority (50 percent or more) of the statewide vote, that candidate receives all 40 delegates.” In early February, Suffolk University’s survey found Trump ahead of Haley, 55 percent to 38 percent in the state.
The Minnesota GOP allocates delegates based on performance in congressional districts, and Colorado — where Trump is now assured to stay on the ballot — allocates its delegations in proportion to the final statewide vote totals, as long as a candidate surpasses 20 percent.
In Utah, “If a candidate receives a majority of the vote (more than 50 percent), that candidate is allocated all 40 National Convention delegates.” The last poll in Utah, in mid January, had Trump at 49 percent and Haley at 22 percent.
In the California Republican primary, “If a presidential candidate receives a majority (50 percent plus 1) of the . . . statewide vote, that candidate shall be awarded all of California’s [169] delegates.” A late February Emerson College poll put Trump at 75 percent and Haley at 17 percent in the state.
Add it all up, and Haley should win some delegates here and there, while Trump wins a large majority of them.
You’ll hear arguments tonight and tomorrow that Haley ought to drop out and that she can’t win. But she was always a long shot to win; whether she and her campaign want to say it out loud, she’s running a protest or message campaign. And one of the upsides of running a protest or message campaign is that supporters don’t abandon you when you lose, because their support is not dependent upon the perception that you can actually win.
Last Friday, Haley sat for questions with some reporters in Washington, and when one reporter — not me! — referred to “after your bid for president,” Haley quickly retorted, “I’m not sure I’m going to end my bid for president.” She pointed out that her campaign raised $12 million in February, and that while “the rest of the guys were using private jets, we flew commercial. We stayed in Residence Inns and . . . some gross places. We’re a lean, mean operation.” The Haley campaign is unlikely to close up shop because of a lack of funds.
After today, there will still be 26 states and four territories that haven’t held their Republican presidential primaries or caucuses yet. Haley might as well stay in, just to give Republicans and independents and crossover Democrats their opportunity to say, “No, this is not the right direction. Count me out.”
If someone wants to gripe, as of this morning, the Republican primary vote — across all contests so far — splits 63.9 percent for Trump, 31.6 percent for Haley. As of this morning, Trump has won 80 percent of the available delegates and Haley has won 15 percent — with the remainder from Iowa split between Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. But the delegate-allocation rules of the primaries and caucuses are the rules, they were set well ahead of time, and the Haley campaign knew what it had to do to win.
How Is Justice Sotomayor Doing Lately?
Josh Barro offers another argument that Democrats don’t want to hear, but that they ought to contemplate:
Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 this June. If she retires this year, Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the court — playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the court again relies on both the timing of the deaths or retirements of conservative judges, plus not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.
But if Sotomayor does not retire this year, we don’t know when she will next be able to retire with a likely liberal replacement. It’s possible that Democrats will retain the presidency and the Senate at this year’s elections, in which case the insurance created by a Sotomayor retirement won’t have been necessary. But if Democrats lose the presidency or the Senate this fall (or both) she’ll need to stay on the court until the party once again controls both. That could be just a few years, or it could be a while — for example, Democrats have previously had to wait 14 years from 1995 to 2009, and 12 years from 1981 to 1993. In other words, if Sotomayor doesn’t retire this year, she’ll be making a bet that she will remain fit to serve through age 82 or 84 — and she’ll be taking the whole Democratic Party coalition along with her in making that high-stakes bet.
If Democrats lose the bet, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority will turn into a 7-2 majority at some point within the next decade. If they win the bet, what do they win? They win the opportunity to read dissents written by Sotomayor instead of some other liberal justice. This is obviously an insane trade. Democrats talk a lot about the importance of the Court and the damage that has been done since the court has swung in a more conservative direction, most obviously including the end of constitutional protections for abortion rights. So why aren’t Democrats demanding Sotomayor’s retirement?
And now, the counterargument: While Justice Sotomayor has diabetes and travels with a medic, she may have many healthy years ahead of her. The justice’s father passed away from heart problems at age 42; her mother, Celina Baez Sotomayor, lived to be 94. And we should note that Sotomayor is barely the third-oldest justice on the court right now; Clarence Thomas turns 76 in June, Samuel Alito turns 74 next month, and Chief Justice John Roberts turned 69 in January.
Sotomayor could justifiably scoff that in a world with a president who will turn 82 shortly after Election Day, a GOP challenger who turns 78 in June, a Senate majority leader who’s 73, and a Senate minority leader who will step down in the near future at age 82 . . . at 69 going on 70, she’s just middle-aged.
Finally, recent history has demonstrated to us that Democrats can’t make Sotomayor retire, any more than they could make Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or Joe Biden, or Senator Dianne Feinstein retire.
ADDENDUM: Apparently, a slim majority of voters trust Donald Trump more than Joe Biden on the issue of infrastructure. As I argued yesterday, this might represent frustration with the slow pace of progress after the passage of the infrastructure law, but it more likely represents voters not feeling good about anything Biden has done, deeming him too old and feeble to influence events.