A Less Than Super Tuesday

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

A lackluster Super Tuesday betrayed an unwritten reality that the country is currently staring down the paradox of Republican and Democratic primaries serving as coronations for two polarizing candidates, who may not even be on the ballot come November. 

Voters still shaken from the post-general election turbulence of 2016 and 2020 might be pleased that this year’s primaries have been prosaically predictable. President Trump won fourteen states of the fifteen up for grabs; Biden took all fourteen states in play during the Democratic primary while losing the territory of American Samoa. 

But the 2024 primaries are more than meets the eye. There’s the issue of uncommitted voters, exacerbated by a protest movement that started in Michigan and spread to Minnesota on Super Tuesday, with a reported 20% in the North Star state falling into that category. 

Add to this the fact that the Democratic nominee happens to be a president who fails to arouse much excitement among people registered in his own party, while he is the first incumbent in 44 years to lose a primary (to Jason Palmer in American Samoa) and the picture becomes more clear.

But a question lingers: are these predictable rites of primary passage by the duopoly merely a mask for a swing toward independent and third-party voting that we may see on election day?

Clearly, the passion on both traditional sides of the aisle is lacking. Even those who strongly supported Biden in 2020 are commenting on the self-evident cognitive decline of the oldest sitting president in history. With the formal end of primary season in sight, it is not crazy to suggest that Biden may withdraw from the race after primaries are over. If that happens, delegates at the Democratic convention would be responsible for selecting a new candidate. If this happens, Superdelegates representing the party’s leadership would play a substantial role in crowning a candidate who hadn’t faced any scrutiny during primaries. If Biden were to drop out post-convention, the DNC would have a free hand to select his replacement.

While it is looking less likely that Trump’s many criminal indictments will formally derail his campaign, it is still prudent to expect the unexpected. If Trump were unable to continue his candidacy, expect a Republican Convention bloodbath during which the Republican establishment’s darling, Nikki Haley, could battle with Republican delegates supporting a surrogate Trump. Such a figure could be the self-styled Trump heir apparent, Vivek Ramaswamy.

Making matters more unusual are the preemptive threats that Congressional Democrats might fail to certify a would-be Trump victory by invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,which prohibits someone from holding any elected office if he has been found to violate his oath of office and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”

These plans were revealed hours before Super Tuesday voting by Representative James Raskin (D-MD), as reported in Newsweek. 

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that states cannot enforce their interpretation of Section 3 against political candidates running for a federal office, left the door open for Congress to enforce such an interpretation against a hypothetically victorious Donald Trump. Of course, the Congress that gets to certify the next president will be the Congress made up of victors in the 2024 election. Therefore, if Democrats overturn the slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives, such an unusual scenario is not beyond the realm of possibilities. 

And, just like that, the most predictable primary in decades has become one in which there are a number of devils in a number of details. Super Tuesday may have definitively answered a question long since settled in the minds of most voters, namely that 2024 will be a repeat of 2020: a Biden-Trump faceoff. But below the surface it is becoming increasingly clear that the Democrat establishment will stop at almost nothing to prevent Donald Trump from re-entering the White House. 

The reason “almost” is a key component of this equation is that the one thing the Democrats could have transparently done to stop Trump is to allow for a pluralistic primary based on an issues-based debate about the future of the country. That time has all but passed as Biden’s one-time Democrat challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was forced out of the party and subsequently he declared as an independent candidate in October 2023. 

Between a presumptive Republican candidate that Democrats won’t allow to govern and an incumbent president rapidly losing popularity among erstwhile supporters, Super Tuesday is starting to feel more like the beginning of an absurdist new political reality, rather than the placid zenith of a normal primary season.