Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump has tallied victories in at least 11 states voting on Super Tuesday, heading toward a rematch with his Democratic successor Joe Biden in November.
Exit polls showed Trump won California, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas and Colorado on Wednesday night.
However, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, denied Trump a clean sweep of the Super Tuesday contests with a victory in Vermont’s Republican primary.
Voters in 15 US states and one US territory– American Samoa– started to cast primary ballots on Super Tuesday, one of the most important dates in the United States presidential election calendar.
Trump celebrated the election results in remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, saying “they call it Super Tuesday for a reason.”
Biden, in a statement released by his campaign, warned that Trump is “determined to destroy” US democracy, after the two rivals scored big wins in the Super Tuesday primaries.
Trump “is determined to destroy our democracy, rip away fundamental freedoms like the ability for women to make their own health care decisions, and pass another round of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy — and he’ll do or say anything to put himself in power,” Biden said.
Both Trump and Biden are facing high disapproval ratings due to Washington’s past and present economic, political, and military failures.
Biden’s support for the Israeli regime’s months-long genocidal war on the Palestinians trapped in the besieged Gaza Strip has angered his voter base, possibly impacting the election result.
Meanwhile, during an interview ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, Trump, like Biden, supported the Israeli regime and said he is “in Israel’s camp” amid the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip.
“You’ve got to finish the problem. You had a horrible invasion. It took place. It would have never happened if I was president, by the way,” he told a Fox News host, when asked if he was “on board” with the way Israel was “taking the fight to Gaza.”
Trump then avoided a question on whether he supported a ceasefire in Gaza, sufficing to say that he hated “seeing what’s happening” there.
According to US media, Trump, who in the initial days of the war had said he backed Israel “permanently destroying” Hamas, had mostly gone quiet on the issue in recent months.
