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Super Tuesday becomes the latest milestone to pass in the race for the White House in 2024. As expected, the Donald Trump juggernaut steamrolled Nikki Haley, as the 45th President won every state on the GOP slate except Vermont. Haley suspended her campaign Wednesday, meaning the Joe Biden/Donald Trump rematch is now all but officially on for November 5th. But what else does the Super Tuesday data tell us about Election 2024? Connell McShane is the host of “News Nation Now with Connell McShane,” seen weekdays from 3-5pm on News Nation. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program and says there are now trends we can observe from Tuesday’s results at the polls.
As McShane explained it to Berman and Riedel, the key takeaway from Super Tuesday is that more of Trump’s coalition stood behind him, compared to Biden’s coalition standing behind the incumbent President. “I think, after January 6, 2021, the conventional wisdom, understandably, would be that, well, Donald Trump got X per cent of the vote and lost to Joe Biden. There’s no way if he runs again in 2024 that he’ll get more people to vote for him; if anything, he’s gonna lose people in 2024. And now that we’re actually there and we’re looking at the data, most of it shows that Biden is losing more of his voters from 2020 than Trump is from 2020; in other words, Trump has kept most of his coalition together.”
Another key takeaway is that voters haven’t shared Biden’s enthusiasm for the economy, though McShane says that could change as the year wears on. “At some point this year, interest rates will probably come down. The economy, by rights, should be a positive for this president but right now it’s not. You could say he’s not selling it right, all that kind of thing. That might be part of it. People aren’t feeling it the way the numbers are showing it. I think that’s a big part of it, and then again, I think it’s just taking a while, and that might turn into more of a positive later in the year for the president than it is right now.”
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