The contest no one wants seems to be on. Matthew Partridge reports
Donald Trump and Joe Biden dominated the “Super Tuesday” primary elections in the US, effectively setting up the rematch for president “most voters say they do not want”, say David Charter and Hugh Tomlinson in The Times. With the exception of Vermont, Trump “easily won” most of the contests, putting himself within “touching distance” of formally becoming his party’s presumptive nominee next week; Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining rival, is expected to suspend her campaign. Similarly, Biden, who has “the lowest ratings of any post-war president in their re-election year”, won every state up for grabs against “token opposition”, with only a “minor upset” in the overseas territory of American Samoa.
Two incumbents go to war
Those victories were not the only boost Trump has received recently, say Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld for The Hill. Before the votes in the primaries were cast, the Supreme Court unanimously stopped attempts to ban him from the ballot on the constitutional grounds that he had engaged in “insurrection”. Trump still faces 91 criminal counts across four cases, but his attempts to delay the three most damaging cases “have been mostly successful so far” – the cases in Georgia and Florida have been slowed by “an onslaught of pre-trial motions and unexpected scandal”; the federal case is tied up “indefinitely”.
The election battle between Biden and Trump will certainly be “unlike any other contest in modern history”, say Aaron Zitner and Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal. America has never before had to choose between two candidates so old and so strongly disliked, nor between two candidates “essentially running as incumbents”, in that both have already established White House records. The candidates will be making their pitch “to an electorate that is more polarised and fractur
