Donald Trump wins Virginia as Super Tuesday polls start to close

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Donald Trump won the Republican primary contest in Virginia, on a night that could bring him to the brink of securing his party’s presidential nomination to challenge Joe Biden for the White House in November’s US election.

Trump’s victory in Virginia, according to the Associated Press, came ahead of poll closings in 14 other states that were also holding primaries on Super Tuesday, the pivotal date on the primary calendar.

The former president holds a commanding lead in surveys of Republican voters, and is expected to prevail across the board, putting pressure on Nikki Haley, his main rival, to abandon her bid. So far she has only won the Republican primary in the District of Columbia, the seat of the US capital.

Trump is expected to approach the 1,215 delegates to the Republican National Convention that he needs to seal the party’s nomination in July — but not cross that threshold until later this month.

Biden has been dominating the Democratic primary contests across all the states that have held votes so far, overcoming challenges from rivals Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson that never gained any significant traction. On Tuesday, he won the Iowa caucus, which held a mail-in contest, with the backing of 91 per cent of Democratic voters in the Midwestern state. He also won the Virginia and Vermont primaries, according to the AP.

The results set the US up for the first presidential election rematch since 1892, when former president Democrat Grover Cleveland defeated Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison.

Polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans do not want to see Biden, who is 81, and Trump, 77, facing off again for the White House, but primary voters in both parties have slammed the door shut on any alternatives as rival campaigns faltered.

Trump’s overwhelming advantage in the Republican primary contest represents a startling comeback for the former president, who was impeached twice by the House of Representatives while he was in office and is facing 91 criminal charges in federal and state courts.

Trump has continued to deny the results of the 2020 election on the campaign trail, and warned that he would seek revenge against his political opponents if he wins another term in office.

But many Republican voters believe he has been a victim of political persecution and fail to blame Trump for the attack by a mob of his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

They yearn for a new, massive crackdown on immigration at the border with Mexico and a return to the pre-pandemic economy under Trump, when inflation was subdued, interest rates were low and unemployment was slightly below its level today.

Republican voters have also largely embraced Trump’s isolationist foreign policy views and shrugged off his more favourable stance on Russian President Vladimir Putin, including his recent suggestion that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want” to Nato allies that do not spend enough on defence.

But perhaps most importantly, Trump was able to cast himself as a viable general election candidate against Biden, despite his defeat in 2020 and the defeat of several of his preferred congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Trump has been helped by general election polling showing him leading Biden by 2 percentage points nationally, according to the latest average on Realclearpolitics.com.

Nevertheless, his ability to win over moderate and swing voters against Biden remains in question, because of his abrasive style and rhetoric, as well as the extreme nature of some of his policies. A potentially decisive factor in November will be whether Haley voters in the Republican primary return to Trump, flip to Biden, switch to a third-party candidate, or stay home altogether.

Biden has his own big political vulnerabilities, starting with the belief of many Americans that he is too old to hold office for another four years — but also discontent with his handling of a number of crucial issues, including the economy, immigration and even foreign policy. Biden’s only clear edge at the moment is on the issue of abortion and reproductive rights, following the conservative-led Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the constitutional right to end a pregnancy.