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EVEN IF ITS moniker might sound dramatic, ‘Super Tuesday’ rightly has its place as the most signficant voting day of the US primary season.
Put simply, Joe Biden would not be President Biden right now were it not for Super Tuesday four years ago.
Biden faced Super Tuesday 2020 in third place in the race, trailing both Senator Bernie Sanders and the upstart campaign of Pete Buttigieg.
He was struggling to consolidate a scattered moderate vote and was falling behind on campaign funding. He needed a big Super Tuesday and boy did he get it.
Buttigieg, who went on to be picked for Biden’s Cabinet, unexpectedly dropped out of the race ahead of Super Tuesday, clearing the field for Biden to take on Sanders in a number of states that were favourable to him.
Biden ended up winning ten states to Sanders’ four, with a big victory in South Carolina convincing many Democrats that he was the man to take on Donald Trump.
Trump himself took a giant leap towards his first nomination in 2016 by racking up seven Super Tuesday wins out of 11 to put Ted Cruz on the back foot.
Fast forward to today and while South Carolina is again significant, Super Tuesday is not.
Trump, now running as an electorally defeated and indicted former president, all but locked up his third straight Republican nomination last week with a victory in South Carolina.
South Carolina is the home state of his only remaining opponent Nikki Haley and his comfortable 60% to 40% victory removed any lingering hope she might have of winning the nomination through conventional means.
Haley is a former South Carolina governor and though she’s been spinning the 40% she won as an example of opposition to Trump, her inability to win in the state was basically the final nail in the coffin for her chances.
Haley did get her first win of the contest on Sunday when she won the Washington DC primary, but the fact that her only victory came in a Democrat-leaning jurisdiction that isn’t even a state doesn’t exactly build momentum going into today.
Democrats are technically holding a primary process too but incumbent Biden is a virtual dead cert.
How the primaries work
Presidential candidates are selected by party members who vote first in statewide elections known as primaries.
Candidates are allocated a certain number of party delegates from each state based on how well they did in statewide votes.
Those delegates then attend national party conventions and use their vote in accordance with how candidates performed in their state.
It varies state-by-state because some places use a winner-take-all system, but by-and-large the greater the margin of victory the greater the number of delegates a candidate will receive from that state.
As it stands, Trump has already amassed 244 delegates to Haley’s 43, giving him a commanding lead.
Actually up for decision today are fifteen states: Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.
Together they represent 874 delegates and if, as expected, Trump runs the table he will be nearing the 1,215 required to officially lock up the nomination.
In fact, Trump’s campaign is claiming he will win at least 773 delegates today and surpass the magic number needed to secure the nomination in about two weeks.
Momentum
Coming into Super Tuesday today Trump has all the momentum, something that was boosted further yesterday by a significan decision by the US Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court found that Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot in the general election was unconstitutional, effectively giving the former president an increasingly rare win in court as his legal troubles mount up.
His legal problems, which include a penalty from the state of New York that could top $500 bn and 91 felony counts across four prosecutions, are being touted as the reason why Haley has not yet dropped out of the race.
As the only other remaining Republican, Haley is the candidate best positioned to step in if Trump is unable to continue for whatever reason, be it legal or health-related.
The difficulty she may face after today, however, is increased pressure from within her own party if it becomes clear that Trump has already won the argument among Republicans.
Super Tuesday therefore mightn’t be as decisive as it has been in other years but it could let us know how long Haley has left before the Biden-Trump rematch is finally official.
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It’s really not that hard to slow down. Your destination will still be there and you’ll still have your life and a car at the end.
Why are you assuming speed was the cause?
You can overturn an low speeds.
What else causes cars to roll over? Pretty sure there weren’t extreme winds or an angry mob around to push the car over.
Don’t be willfully ignorant. Most car accidents (rollovers included) in this country are caused by excessive speed.
Stupidity that’s what. You don’t need to be particularly fast to overturn a car.
I once rolled a car over a couple of years ago going at a low speed. Tight corner down a fairly narrow rural road I hit a slippy/oily patch and lost the rear, I panicked and ran out of road as I tried to correct it – I went into the ditch which acted like a ramp, so to speak, and she rolled over. Definitely wasn’t me going too fast. To be fair though from that photo it seems the driver was on a nice good stretch of road so you have to think speed did play a part.
Seeingeye, the marks on the road aren’t very long, which could mean it didn’t go very far upside down, that’d suggest lower speed, and that car looks light and fairly tall, so maybe a higher centre of gravity!! That could overturn it without high speed!!
In fairness, The Fiat Panda will role a lot sooner and easier than other cars due to its odd dynamics of narrow axel width combined with high center of gravity. Two lads could push one over.
Ya, it’s definitely possible to roll at low speed. You can tell by the comparatively low roof damage that the vehicle wasn’t being driven excessively fast.
@seeingeye – don’t be wilfully ignorant ? Would you not apply this to your own comment ? You can roll a car at low speed. This is fact, not science fiction.
Rear tyre on the drivers side is different from the rest, such combination is a deathtrap.
I am honestly surprised that this is legal and does not void the insurance.
That’s why you don’t buy a car that looks like a confused mutated blue bubble.
A 4 sentence story….wow give me more of this obdulla longata porn.
Same story as yesterday’s today?
Fiat Panda, must have rolled over a snail
Did Holmatro sponsor this post?
It’ll be on car sales websites as a time warp minter in a few weeks time.
Thats a wide road along there, it turned over because of bad driving is all
Is that a fiat cinquecento or (chunttogetinto)
There was a strong gust of wind in Tallaght yesterday morning.
Not a single mention about the fire truck being a Scania 340 4×2 crew cab.
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