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Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump gestures at a watch party event to mark the Super Tuesday primary elections at his Mar-a-Lago property, in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 5, 2024.
Super Tuesday results shock no one
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump cemented their leads in the 16 primary contests yesterday, and a rematch of 2020 now looks inevitable.
Trump won at least 13 of the votes and is set to clinch the nomination as soon as next week. His biggest competition, Nikki Haley, carved out a surprise win in Vermont, bringing her delegate tally up to 89 compared to Trump’s 995. But she opted out of a victory speech in the Green Mountain State – and is reportedly planning to suspend her campaign.
But her showing in North Carolina signaled that anti-Trump sentiment is alive and well, especially among independents and college-educated Republicans. Trump only narrowly carried Republican primary voters with college degrees in North Carolina, 51% to 45%, and roughly one in four Republicans in the Tar Heel State said they would feel dissatisfied if Trump won the nomination.
Biden blew his rivals out of the water. The president won every race apart from the American Samoa, where he tied with entrepreneur Jason Palmer.
But the trend of Democratic voters choosing “uncommitted” in protest of US policy in Gaza continued on Super Tuesday. Uncommitted earned 19% of the votes in Minnesota, mirroring the results in Michigan last week and potentially threatening the Midwestern “blue wall” that was critical to his victory over Trump in 2020.
Other key races: In the California Senate race, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff boxed out his Democratic rivals and is likely to replace the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein when he faces off against the GOP candidate in the dependably blue state. In Alabama, newly drawn districts look likely to lead to the red state sending two Black representatives to Washington for the first time.
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Are you wondering about other elections around the globe this year? Check out GZERO's guide to the most pivotal votes of 2024.
Ian Explains: How the US turned red and blue
Do you live in a red state or a blue state? Until fairly recently, such a question would have been nonsensical in the US. Ian Bremmer rolls back the clock on GZERO World to take a look.
On November 4, 1980, NBC News became the first major network to call the presidential election for Ronald Reagan. What stands out about this clip is not the absolute drubbing that President Carter received, but those colors on that map. States that had gone for Reagan are blue, states yet to be decided are that sickly 1980s yellow, and lonely little Georgia, which native son Jimmy Carter had managed to hold on to, is red.
It wasn’t, in fact, until the contested 2000 election between then Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W Bush that major news networks agreed on a standard red-state-Republican // blue state-Democrat map scheme. That’s right, one of the most iconic signifiers of Republican or Democrat identity—second only to the elephant and donkey—is a modern invention, and one borne out of confusion.
Al Gore’s legacy will forever be tied to his fateful decision to put the peaceful transfer of power over his personal ambitions. He was also acknowledging a shared reality, as unpalatable as it might have been for himself, where George W Bush would be the next president of Red and Blue states, alike.
Watch the full GZERO World episode: Al Gore on US elections & climate change
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Democratic presidential candidate US Representative Dean Phillips greets supporters at a campaign event ahead of the New Hampshire presidential primary election in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21, 2024.
AI has entered the race to primary Joe Biden
For a brief moment this week, there were two Dean Phillips – the man and the bot. The human is a congressman from Minnesota who’s running for the Democratic nomination for president, hoping to rise above his measly 7% poll numbers to displace sitting President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.
But there was also an AI chatbot version of the 55-year-old congressman.
A political action committee that’s raised millions to finance Phillips’ longshot bid for president from donors like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, released an AI chatbot called Dean.Bot last week. It only lasted a few days.
The bot, which disclosed it was artificial intelligence, mimicked Phillips, letting voters converse with it like it was the real congressman.
The 2024 presidential election has seen AI-generated videos and advertisements, but nothing in the way of a candidate stand-in — until now. And for good reason: OpenAI, the company with the most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, doesn’t allow developers to adapt its software for political campaigning.
OpenAI took action against Dean.Bot, which is built on ChatGPT’s platform. The company shut down the bot and suspended access for its developer on Friday, saying the bot violated its terms of use. Funnily enough, the PAC behind the bot is run by an early OpenAI employee.
There are no current federal regulations prohibiting the use of AI in political campaigning, though legislation has been introduced intended to curb the politically deceptive use of AI, and the Federal Election Commission has sought public comment on the same issue.
Phillips the man, meanwhile, has had to resort to campaigning in the flesh in New Hampshire ahead of today’s primary since his AI doppelganger is nowhere to be found.
3 themes to watch as US election season begins
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
With the Iowa caucuses coming up, what are the big themes to watch in American politics this year?
Monday of next week is the first day the official kickoff of the US presidential campaign season, even though it feels like it's already been going on for six years. It really only starts on next Monday with the Iowa caucuses begin. Donald Trump has a big lead in the Republican primary. Nobody's challenging President Biden on the Democratic side. And so here are three themes to watch throughout this election year.
The first is, can anyone beat Trump in the Republican primary? Right now, it's down to basically Trump, the top of a field of contenders. And then you have a distant second, former South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. And in third place, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with some also rans like Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don't really have a chance. Of that bunch, Haley is probably best positioned to make a deep run into the primaries because of her ability to consolidate the fundraising apparatus behind her in the last several months. DeSantis could still come on strong with a strong showing in Iowa, but it's really going to take a lot of money to last through the March Super Tuesday caucuses. And right now, Haley looks like the best bet. But to get there, she's going to need to win a state. Right now, she's behind in Iowa. She's close, but still behind in New Hampshire. And she’s still behind in her home state of South Carolina. So the thing to watch for is field consolidation in late January, maybe early February, And if Haley can actually get some momentum to beat Trump.
The second thing to pay attention to are Trump's criminal trials. And a major question for 2024 is how much do these things hurt him on the campaign trail? Certainly being prosecuted by the Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan and Biden's DOJ has helped Trump consolidate his position on top of the Republican field. But it seems like the conventional wisdom is that it probably hurts Trump in the general election. Now, this may or may not be true. Voters already have been accustomed to the fact that Trump's been accused of various crimes. Trump himself is running on delegitimizing the system that's put him on trial, and that's going to be a continued theme throughout 2024. And the question for the general election is right now, Trump is beating Biden in head to head polling matchups, which are not very reliable this far out. Does that advantage start to erode as Trump's criminal trial stay in the news throughout the summer? And what happens if he's eventually convicted of a crime? And the one to watch is probably the DC election interference case that the federal government has brought in the District of Columbia.
Final thing to watch for in 2024, what happens to the state of the economy? Biden's approval ratings are relatively low for an incumbent seeking reelection in the high thirties. That's a pretty bad sign. The economy's been fairly resilient so far with low unemployment and decent wage growth. But Americans are still saying they're very unhappy about the state of things. Inflation has been a huge part of that. High grocery prices, expensive services are all things that Americans are dealing with on a day to day basis. Does the economy flatline or tank in the first half of 2024, which would be a real disaster for the incumbent President Biden? Or does it continue to muddle along and potentially improve as inflation fades in the rearview mirror, which would be a tailwind for the incumbent? And you'd expect to see that in rising approval ratings throughout the spring and summer.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Ballot battle: Colorado vs Trump
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
Is the Colorado Supreme Court going to block Trump from appearing on the ballot there?
The answer is probably not, but they might. The Colorado Supreme Court, this week, ruled that former President Trump, cannot appear on the Colorado ballot on the grounds that he engaged in insurrection against the United States, which under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, bars a political candidate from appearing for federal office. Now, the Supreme Court is almost certainly going to take this issue up. This is a precedent that will be set for other states who are also trying to bar Trump from appearing on the ballot at all. And this puts the Supreme Court in a really difficult position. The court does not want to be in a position to intervene in what it sees as very political questions.
The most prominent example of them getting involved was, of course, the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, which basically handed the presidential election to then President Bush as they had to resolve a very narrow set of differences over what counted as a legitimate ballot in Florida. And in this case, the court is once again going to be asked to make a very political decision about who can run for president. The courts would much prefer that the political branches of the government make this determination, including Congress. And one legal argument they've made is that the 14th Amendment is not self-executing, but would in fact require Congress to step up and define what it means to commit insurrection against the United States.
There are multiple paths for the court to defer on this question, including the idea that the Senate has already acquitted President Trump of inciting an insurrection against the United States. But this is not an obvious position for the court to be in. They are certainly going to come out of this looking more politicized one way or the other. Either they bar the most popular and prominent Republican candidate from appearing on the ballot, which Republicans are going to say, suggest that we live in a banana republic, or they're going to say that Trump can go ahead and appear on the ballot, which will make Democrats to say, well, the court is completely politicized because the six Republican-appointed judges will always obviously going to side with the Republican presidential nominee.
A decision in this case could come quite quickly as the Colorado ballot deadline is approaching in early January and the court is going to need to weigh in here in order to set precedent for other states that are looking at doing something similar to what Colorado did.
So yet another unprecedented piece of a Trump presidential story is this case and Trump's norm, destroying political career continues to challenge the very foundations of the American Constitution. So lots to watch here. Stay tuned.
Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis in a storm
Hurricane Idalia is set to make landfall on Wednesday in the US state of Florida. The storm will be the first of many this hurricane season, but it blows in at a sensitive political moment for state Gov. Ron DeSantis. The woke-bashing Republican is currently a distant second to Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, but he’s also fending off an increasingly stiff challenge from the youthful upstart conservative tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. (Poll numbers here.)
If DeSantis handles Idalia well, it’ll enable him to look experienced and presidential, drawing a contrast with Ramaswamy’s scant political experience. Of course, if DeSantis flubs it, Idalia could deal a crippling blow to his campaign.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Christie takes aim at Trump
No one can win the 2024 Republican Party nomination for president without winning over millions of voters who like Donald Trump. For now, the polls say those voters are happy with Trump. This creates a dilemma for his rivals. All of them need someone to dent Trump’s popularity via direct attacks on the man and his candidacy. But no one wants to infuriate Trump supporters by leading those attacks, allowing other candidates to benefit. They all want someone else to lead the charge.
Cue Chris Christie, the former Trump rival-turned-ally-turned-caustic critic who will enter the race for the GOP nomination on Tuesday (former VP Mike Pence is set to launch his bid on Wednesday). The former New Jersey governor is currently polling at less than 1%, and he’s highly unlikely to win anything. But Christie has already gone where candidates like Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nicki Haley, and others fear to tread by publicly referring to Trump as a coward, a loser, and a “puppet of Putin.” (He once blamed Trump for giving him COVID.)
It’s hard to say whether a Christie kamikaze candidacy might bring Trump’s high poll numbers back to Earth, but one thing is clear: Beginning Tuesday, the fight for the Republican presidential nomination is about to get louder.
2024 elections: Another likely Biden v Trump extravaganza
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
What's the outlook for President Biden's reelection campaign?
This week, President Biden announced his intention to run for reelection in 2024, on the same day that he made the announcement that he was going to run for president in 2020. Already the oldest president in American history, Biden would be 82 years old on inauguration day if he wins, and 86 on his last day in office, putting a lot of attention on his running mate, Kamala Harris, who has proven herself not exactly ready for primetime in the three years she served as vice president, but will be once again Biden's running mate in '24.
Biden's announcement video put a lot of emphasis on a key theme of the last three years of his presidential campaigning, which has been democracy in the United States designed to create a contrast with Republicans, and in particular former President Donald Trump, who's under investigation by the Department of Justice for inciting the January 6th riots to overturn the results of the last election. Biden's very unlikely to face any serious opposition within the Democratic Party who are largely united around beating Republicans. And despite his advanced age and approval ratings in the low forties, they don't want to do anything to jeopardize their chances of doing that.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump is looking pretty good so far in the nomination battle. Nobody has yet to emerge that can seriously challenge him. Although it is very early in this race and there haven't really been any serious declared candidates as we await for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to finish the Florida legislative session this year, and probably declare sometime later this spring. A rematch between President Trump and President Biden would pit two of the oldest candidates ever in American history against each other, which probably plays in Biden's favor because it makes his age less of an issue on the campaign. But if DeSantis is the nominee at age 44, he can really create that contrast with President Biden.
Biden has a pretty good legislative record to run on with a very productive two years of bipartisan accomplishments. And so far, the economy, despite high levels of inflation and rising interest rates, it has been pretty resilient, which is typically a nice tailwind for an incumbent seeking reelection in the United States. We are almost a year and a half out from votes being cast in this campaign, and not a lot legislatively is going to get done this year, which means that US politics will be continually dominated by these reelection cycles and expect to see your news feed clogged with the latest drama around former President Trump and the potential reelection of President Biden. Thanks for watching.