Biden and Trump secure nominations
US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have both won enough primary contests to clinch their respective parties’ nominations for this year’s presidential election. The upcoming faceoff will be the first rematch between candidates since 1956.
Biden won his party’s primaries in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington on Tuesday, bringing his total number of pledged delegates to 2,107, comfortably above the 1,968 needed to win the Democratic Party’s nomination.
Trump also won in these three states, as well as in the Republican Party’s Hawaii caucus. As of Tuesday night, Trump had won 1,241 delegates, passing the 1,215 needed for nomination.
Biden ran essentially unopposed, with only token opposition from businessman Dean Phillips, author Marianne Williamson, and a smattering of minor candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr initially entered the primaries as a Democrat, before announcing in October that he would run as an independent. The Democratic National Committee organized no debates between contenders and, in January, declared the primaries “meaningless.”
Trump faced a more crowded field of challengers, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. However, these presidential hopefuls suspended their campaigns after decisive victories by Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire in January, with only Haley managing to hang on until a crushing defeat in last week’s ‘Super Tuesday’ contests.
Delegates from both parties will declare their chosen candidates at the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer. However, with Trump and Biden already backed by enough delegates to make this process a formality, both candidates took to social media on Tuesday to celebrate their victories and trade insults.
“Come November, we will vote in record numbers, and we can do it, it’s within our power to do it,” Biden said in a video posted to X. “Are you ready to defend democracy? Are you ready to protect our freedom? Are you ready to win this election?”
“This was a great day of victory,” Trump said in a video posted on X by his campaign, “but now we have to get back to work because we have the worst president in the history of the country. His name is Joe Biden, sometimes referred to as crooked Joe Biden, and he must be defeated.”
November’s election will be the first presidential rematch since 1956, when Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in a landslide, having won a similarly one-sided victory over the Illinois governor four years earlier.
Over the past two years, opinion polling has consistently shown that American voters are unenthused about a second Trump-Biden showdown. However, recent polls show Trump leading his incumbent rival by between two and nine points, with voters rating Trump’s performance in the Oval Office – particularly on the economy, crime, and border security – more positively than Biden’s.
