Trump racks up 3 more wins before Super Tuesday

Former President Donald Trump swept three events Saturday, capturing more delegates for the GOP presidential nomination in a final sprint to Super Tuesday.

He won the delegate haul at a party convention in Michigan, as well as the Missouri caucuses, which set him up to win the state delegates during the district conventions in April and a statewide convention in May. He finished the day with victory in the Idaho caucuses.

The string of wins bolsters Trump’s stride to the GOP nomination and confirms his stronghold on the party’s base, even as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is still looking to snag her first election year win. This weekend’s contests come before Tuesday, when 15 states could potentially seal the fate of the 2024 Republican primary.

“We’ve been launching like a rocket to the Republican nomination. We just got numbers today that were unbelievable,” Trump said at a rally in Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday, listing his wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and other states.

“But today it looks like we’re winning close to 100 percent of both Missouri and Michigan. … This is getting to be crazy. Right? This is getting to be pretty wild. And it’s a great honor.”

In Michigan, Trump dominated the caucuses, winning all 39 delegates awarded Saturday at 13 separate events held in Grand Rapids amid state party chaos. He had previously won most of the 16 delegates allotted in Michigan’s statewide primary earlier in the week. He then clinched wins in Missouri and Idaho on Saturday afternoon, as voters made their selections at party-run meetings.

Trump has seen commanding victories in every state contest to date and could secure the GOP nomination later this month. Haley has vowed to stay in the race through Super Tuesday, as she urges the Republican Party to move on from the former president.

The audience looks on Nikki Haley speaks at a campaign event in Needham, Massachusetts, on March 2, 2024.

Haley did not mention her latest losses in a speech in Needham, Massachusetts, on Saturday night as she continued her swing through the Super Tuesday states. But she did flick at Michigan’s primary results from Tuesday, in which she won 27 percent of the vote.

Trump “campaigned there for eight years, I campaigned there for two days and we got [nearly] 30 percent of the vote,” she said to applause.

“If you look at the early states, he may have won them, yes. But he didn’t get 40 percent of the vote,” Haley said. “That’s no small number.”

The next event on the GOP calendar is the primary in the District of Columbia, running Friday through Sunday — a race that could potentially lean in Haley’s favor. North Dakota Republicans will follow with their caucuses Monday.

She again called out Trump and his campaign for “threatening” Republican lobbyists to vote for him in the Washington, D.C., primary — or lose access to him if he retakes the White House.

“You can’t threaten people. You can’t push them out, because that is not a winning combination,” Haley said.

And New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, returning to the campaign trail with Haley in a neighboring state, claimed the former South Carolina governor is “going to make history on Tuesday” despite polls showing her trailing Trump across the map.

“Lord knows people think that this thing is wrapped up and it is yesterday’s news,” Sununu said. But, he told the crowd crammed into a hotel ballroom in a Boston suburb: “You guys can give it momentum. You guys can throw gasoline on that fire and really, really show the rest of the country that we ain’t over by a long shot.”

Trump also held two rallies on Saturday: first in Greensboro, North Carolina, before heading to Richmond, Virginia, for an evening event.

He used Saturday’s speeches to hammer on his favorite topics, from his own personal grievances about his legal challenges to the southern border. He leaned into the migrant crisis in particular during both rallies, baselessly accusing President Joe Biden of orchestrating a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”

“Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” Trump said in North Carolina, echoing a racist conspiracy theory that Democrats support illegal immigration as a way to weaken the power of white voters.

“Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

He continued this rant later in Virginia, suggesting Democrats are trying to sign migrants up to “vote in the next election.”