President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday secured the delegates needed to secure their parties’ presidential nominations, according to The Associated Press, bolstering a runoff for the general election in November.
Both men and their campaigns had long awaited this moment. Mr. Biden faced only token opposition in the Democratic primary, as is typical for a sitting president, while Mr. Trump has been his party’s dominant candidate for months.
Their clash in November began to look even more likely after Mr Trump scored a decisive victory in Iowa in January. His victory cleared the field of all but one of his major Republican rivals and put him on an upward trajectory toward his party’s nomination. The primary’s last remaining candidate, Nikki Haley, suspended her campaign last week, further paving an already remarkably clear road for a candidate facing significant legal trouble.
The Associated Press named Mr. Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee after predicting his victory in Georgia, while Mr. Trump was named the presumptive Republican nominee after winning GOP contests in Georgia, Mississippi and Washington State.
Tuesday’s results set the stage for a 2024 general election campaign that, less than eight months away, is expected to be one of the longest in modern American history and the first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years. years.
Already, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden had dropped out of the primaries. With the president facing no major challengers, Mr. Biden’s campaign speeches have highlighted not only his record but also the danger he believes Mr. Trump poses.
In a statement, Mr. Biden said he was honored that Democratic voters “trusted me once again to lead our party — and our country — at a time when the threat posed by Trump is greater than ever ».
And while Mr. Trump worked to dispatch his Republican rivals, his campaign speeches focused on criticism of Mr. Biden and his insistence that the primaries needed to end quickly so his party could focus energy and resources. of November.
In a video posted on social media by his campaign after the nomination, Mr Trump called Tuesday a “big day of victory” but said it was now time to focus on defeating Mr Biden in November. “I want to thank everyone, but more importantly, we have to get to work to defeat Joe Biden,” he said.
Neither will be officially chosen until their party conventions this summer. But Mr. Biden is already using the political and financial machinery of the Democratic National Committee. And last week, the Trump campaign effectively took over the Republican National Committee, imposing mass layoffs on Monday as it reshapes the party’s operations.
That Mr. Trump was able to lock up the Republican nomination so quickly demonstrates the hold he has held on the party and its conservative base, despite his 2020 defeat and failed attempts to overturn it. A series of disappointing midterm losses by candidates he supported. and his 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.
The former president won nearly every nominating contest that awarded delegates, with Ms. Haley notching victories only in Vermont and Washington, D.C., where she became the first woman ever to win a Republican presidential primary or caucus.
But Mr. Trump’s fast-track to the nomination also reflects a behind-the-scenes effort by him and his political team to bend the rules around primaries and delegates in his favor. The rules states use to award delegates to particular candidates are decided by state party officials, and Mr. Trump and his advisers have built relationships with those officials to ease his path.
In a critical example, Mr. Trump’s campaign worked to shape California’s rules, leading party officials there to adopt a winner-take-all system that would award the state’s delegates to a candidate who collected the 50 percent of the statewide vote. That margin favored Mr. Trump, the only candidate at that level.
Mr. Trump finally won the California primary last week, a major moment in the delegate race. California’s 169 delegates gave him 14 percent of the 1,215 delegates needed to win the nomination.
Likewise, Mr. Biden faced little opposition on his way to the nomination, dominating each contest by wide margins. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and environmental lawyer, dropped out of the Democratic nomination contest to run as an independent. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and self-help guru Marianne Williamson never garnered more than a fraction of the vote.
Both men’s strength in their primaries may belie weaknesses in their coalitions that could give them trouble in November, particularly given that the 2020 election was decided by narrow margins in just a handful of states.
In some places where Mr. Trump convincingly won the Republican contests, he still performed comparatively weaker with voters in suburban areas and those who identify as moderates or independents. Such groups, whose support Mr. Trump lost in 2020, can be critical in hotly contested states.
Mr. Biden, for his part, faced a campaign in several primary states that urged voters to protest Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza by voting “non-aligned.” Losing the support of those voters in the fall could weaken the coalition that helped Mr. Biden oust Mr. Trump in 2020.
During Mr. Biden’s first term, voters questioned his age and record, even as economic indicators improved. The president has shown weakness with young people and black and Hispanic voters, key groups in the coalition that carried him to victory last time.
Mr. Biden is viewed unfavorably by a majority of Americans — a precarious position for a president seeking re-election — though so is Mr. Trump.
Both campaigns have argued that voters who supported them in previous years will return to them as the choice crystallizes.
Mr. Biden and his allies also have a significant financial advantage over Mr. Trump, whose legal bills are gaining weight.
With Tuesday’s victories, Mr. Trump locked up the nomination before any of his four criminal cases go to trial. His criminal case in Manhattan, which stems from a 2016 hush money payment to a porn star, is set to go to trial on March 25 and is expected to last six weeks.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued unsuccessfully that the schedule would interfere with his presidential campaign, pointing in part to the primary calendar.
More recently, Mr. Trump’s legal team made a last-ditch effort to delay the trial before it began. In court documents released on Monday, his lawyers argued that the trial should not take place until the Supreme Court decides whether Mr Trump has immunity from prosecution in his criminal case in Washington, which includes allegations that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election.
The judge in the New York case, Juan M. Merchan, is unlikely to grant the request.
