Polls open as Donald Trump and Nikki Haley vie for votes

Joe Biden is expected to take another giant leap towards securing the Democratic nomination on Tuesday night, racking up the delegates across more than a dozen states with little competition from intraparty rivals Dean Philips and Marianne Williamson.

But the contests will still be an important measure of Democratic support for his candidacy. In the Michigan primary last week, 13 per cent of Democrats chose “uncommitted” on the ballot rather than Biden, many of due to his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. All eyes on Tuesday will be on Minnesota, another state in the upper Midwest with a significant share of Arab-American voters, to see if Biden suffers significant defections.

Biden and his team will be hoping that a commanding performance in Tuesday’s primaries will be a springboard to the even more important political event on his calendar this week — the State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Biden has defiantly brushed off concerns about his age and lacklustre polling. “I’m the only one who has ever beat [Trump]. And I’ll beat him again”, he said.

In the Republican presidential nominating contests, each state awards some delegates based on the results of its primary or caucus. In total, there are 2,429 delegates up for grabs before the summer, and 1,215 are needed to win the nomination, which is officially bestowed at a Republican convention scheduled for July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

As of this morning, Donald Trump has won 273 delegates and Nikki Haley just 43.

Tonight — Super Tuesday — offers the biggest pile of delegates of any day on the calendar: 865, or more than one-third of the total. Those include delegates from California (169), Texas (161) and North Carolina (74), along with a dozen other states.

Polls in California, the most populous US state, opened at 10am Eastern time, meaning that voting in nearly all jurisdictions participating in Super Tuesday is under way.

Some polls in Maine have just opened (although most in the eastern state have been open for several hours), while Alaska will be next — and last — of today’s states to kick off its caucus when voting begins at 11am ET.

Voting booths in nearly all the states have been open since earlier this morning, with the highest concentration of states kicking off at 8am ET.

Polls in Vermont and Virginia will at 7pm ET be the first in the country to close.

Super Tuesday lasts longer than the day itself and will kick over into Wednesday: California polls close at 11pm ET — and can take seven hours to tally about half of the results.

“Super Tuesday” is the most important day of the US primary calendar, giving the Democratic and Republican winners a heart-warming verdict backed by cold maths: they are their party’s pick for president.

While neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump can earn the nomination just yet, 15 states are awarding so many delegates that Tuesday’s results should prove that their candidacies appeal to millions of Americans across the cultural divides within their parties.

It is a day that both men know well. Trump’s victories in 2016 and Biden’s victories in 2020 were shocking to the political and media elite, who could not imagine the reality TV star’s takeover of the Republican party or Biden’s ability to bounce back from earlier losses to Bernie Sanders.

This Super Tuesday holds less drama despite Biden’s unpopularity and Trump’s legal battles. Both the president and his predecessor should dominate.