2024 Election: Super Tuesday Results & What’s Next2024Election:SuperTuesdayResults&What’sNext

After the results of Super Tuesday, where 16 states and one U.S. territory held primaries or caucuses for over a third of the available delegates, it became clear that the 2024 presidential election will be the sequel that not many enthusiastically embrace. America is looking at a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump. 

Coming into Super Tuesday, Trump already held a strong lead over his former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, with wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and Michigan, winning 244 delegates to her 43. That lead grew once results were tallied, putting him in the strongest possible position going forward to passing the 1,215-delegate threshold and securing the GOP nomination. Haley can no longer win the Republican nomination with Trump on the ballot and will bow out of the race. 

With both the Democratic and Republican nominees set, discussion now turns to what issues will persuade undecided voters to choose one nominee over the other. Most important is which states will decide who wins the Electoral College, since in 2000, George W. Bush and in 2016, Trump, proved that a presidential victory is possible without winning the popular vote.  

Polls of the hypothetical rematch between Trump and  Biden show them essentially tied nationwide, with the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll putting Trump at 48 percent and Biden at 43 percent in a national survey of registered voters. Given that polls taken this far away from Election Day have proven to be less than reliable in predicting a winner, while Trump is slightly ahead in some, the polls truly indicate that this race is either candidates’ to win or lose. The race will be close, and we may not even know the winner until sometime after Election Day because of that dynamic.

There are seven states to pay attention to as the race unfolds and on election night, as they are likely to decide which candidate wins the Electoral College. These include Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), and Nevada (6). 

In 2020, Biden won by flipping five of these states that voted for Trump in 2016: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Of these states, Biden won Arizona (0.4 points) and Georgia (0.3 points) by a narrow margin and did his best in Michigan (2.8 points) and Pennsylvania (1.2 points).

Wisconsin is likely to play a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential election.  Biden only won the state by 0.6 points in 2020 and Trump won it by 0.6 points in 2016, continuing a trend where four out of the last six presidential elections have been determined by less than a percentage point in Wisconsin. With these small margins of victory, the composition of a state’s electorate will be important. 

Another state to watch is Michigan, which has shifted more towards Democrats since 2016, and has a large Arab-American and Muslim population. This dynamic may work against Biden. During Michigan’s primary on February 27^th, progressive groups, unsatisfied with the President’s handling of the conflict in the Middle East, organized a campaign to show their discontent by asking voters to vote “uncommitted” in the primary. In a state with 200,000 registered Muslim voters and where Biden last won Michigan by about 150,000 votes, these voters could have an impact on who wins the state. 

Further,  Biden’s overall support among Black and Latino voters, important constituencies in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, has also dropped since last October and a poll of Gen Z voters, which tend to more heavily favor Democratic candidates, concludes that  Biden should be doing more to help with their student loan payments. 

Trump’s own standing with voters outside his core supporters will create challenges as he tries to win this fall. Despite Trump’s criticism of the 2020 election process, about 75% of Haley supporters said President Biden was legitimately elected president. In South Carolina, Trump’s core supporters were enough to help the former president win handily against  Haley, but it may be difficult for Trump to broaden his appeal in the general election as exit polls showed that Trump lost moderate and liberal voters to Haley by a wide margin. More than 1 in 5 GOP primary voters said they would not vote for Trump in November if he was the party’s nominee. Similarly, Haley voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin may be reluctant to support  Trump or may not vote at all, which could have an impact given the close margins in these states. 

As usual, the economy remains the top issue on voters’ minds in any presidential election. The 2024 election is no exception. The economy consistently polled as the top issue in a recent Bloomberg poll of swing-state voters. Despite some rosy economic predictions, real household incomes are down 5% compared to 2019 and housing costs are up in several swing state counties, which may push some voters to support Trump over Biden. There are several swing states where real incomes are down more than 10%, including Nevada and Pennsylvania. 

Further, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, in Kent County, Michigan, in January 2020 around 22% of the average person’s annual income went to pay for their home. By September of last year, that number had risen to 35%. In Phoenix, that number jumped from 28% to 45% and in Reno, Nevada, it hit 54% of a person’s annual median income, up from 34% in 2020. As has been the case since almost the start of Biden’s term, Republicans will look to focus on the issue of inflation, as well as the Biden administration’s economic policies in an attempt to appeal to those voters feeling the pinch of higher prices.

Democrats will likely trumpet the post-Covid growth of the economy, low unemployment numbers, and falling inflation. Polling shows generally that voters put more faith in Republicans’ handling of the economy, but the White House hopes to spend the lead up to the election selling the public on “Bidenomics” as recent polling suggests that Americans’ pessimism about the economy has shown some signs of easing up. Of course, a host of other issues, ranging from immigration to individual rights, will also spark decisions amongst undecided voters.

As Biden and Trump prepare for a rematch of the 2020 election, we will see a very close race. This means that any major changes in the markets, health status of either candidate, a guilty verdict from one of Trump’s many legal trials, or the emergence of a third-party candidate on the ballot in certain swing states could tip the scales in either direction.