Super Tuesday live results and analysis: Donald trump wins Virginia as polls begin to close

In the wake of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s death, the race to replace her seat has come down to three Democratic Representatives and two Republicans, one of them a former baseball star — with voters deciding which pair of candidates will proceed to the November ballot on Tuesday.

Katie Hawkinson breaks down what is happening in the Golden State:

The Biden campaign has said that February was the fourth month in a row that the campaign beat its own fundraising record.

Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty said in a statement that “this Super Tuesday, the split screen between our campaign and Donald Trump’s operation (if you can call it that!) couldn’t be more stark: President Biden continues to see record-breaking grassroots enthusiasm around a historic and winning agenda, while Donald Trump is poised to enter the general election broke, saddled by his unwavering support for the extremism Americans repeatedly reject at the ballot box – undermining our democracy, tax giveaways to the rich, and a national abortion ban.

“While Trump spends his limited funds on various other… issues, President Biden’s campaign is using this grassroots momentum to build a cutting-edge and winning campaign for this November,” he added.

Joe Biden will win the Democratic primary in North Carolina, AP projects.

Democrats have long hoped to win back North Carolina ever since Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win the state. Since then, North Carolina has always remained just out of reach for Democrats. Despite this, in 2016, Democratic attorney general Roy Cooper beat incumbent governor Pat McCory to win the governorship after McCrory signed legislation that banned transgender people from using the bathroom aligned with their gender, which led to boycotts from Bruce Springsteen to the NCAA, which is almost sacrosanct in the state that produced Michael Jordan.

Cooper, a white Democrat, would win re-election in 2020, the same year Mark Robinson, a Black Republican with a history of making antisemitic, homophobic and racist remarks, became lieutenant governor.

Robinson has since become a favourite of Trump, making him the presumptive nominee. With Cooper termed out, the race for governor could have an effect on the top of the ticket. Conversely, Josh Stein, North Carolina attorney general and a Democrat, is the likely Democratic nominee for governor. But in a sign of how much the state’s changed, while Cooper hailed from a white working-class area of the state, Stein hails from the suburbs of Raleigh.

If Robinson is too radioactive for North Carolina, it might drag Trump on the ticket or even boost Biden. Incidentally, Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned heavily in North Carolina, including in the state’s HBCUs. For more on the Tar Heel state, read my colleague Ariana Baio’s breakdown.

Donald Trump will win the Republican primary in Virginia, AP projects.

Joe Biden wins the Democratic primary in Vermont, AP projects.

Super Tuesday, the biggest day of the US presidential primary season, arrives on 5 March and promises to have a decisive – if perhaps somewhat anticlimactic – impact on the respective Republican and Democratic races.

All but one of his challengers has long since fallen away, leaving only the well-funded but under-performing ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley still swinging.

She picked up a much-needed win in Washington DC’s primary on Sunday, her first of the season, beating Mr Trump by 62.3 per cent of the vote to his 33.3 per cent, scooping up 19 delegates in the process.

Her win also means we could now find ourselves with a more interesting evening indeed on Tuesday once the results begin to come rolling in.

The Democratic contest is meanwhile even more one-sided, with President Joe Biden seemingly nailed-on to be his party’s candidate again as he seeks a second term in the White House, despite concerns about his advanced age and consistently poor polling.

Nikki Haley will most certainly lose tonight’s Super Tuesday contests. The former South Carolina governor unsurprisinly won the Washington, DC primary this weekend. But tonight, she faces a much tougher go at it on Tuesday than in previous contests. But if she’s going to be even remotely competitive against Donald Trump, she will need to perform well in two regions.

Harris County, Texas and Orange County, California are historic bastions of the exact type of wealthy, college-educated voters who have fled the Republican Party since Mr Trump took over.

Ronald Reagan, the former California governor turned saint of the Repiublican Party, famously said Orange County, located just outside of Los Angeles, is where “conservatives go to die. The median income in Orange County according to the US Census is $109,361, much higher than the national $74,580 median income. In addition, almost 43 per cent of the population has at least a bachelor’s degree and 69 per cent of the population is white.

But since the Trump revolution, it’s become fertile territory for Democrats, as it voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and again for Joe Biden in 2020. Democrats have begun to flip House seats there.

That being said, some Reagan Republicans who are amenable to Ms Haley’s message of tax cuts and a robust foreign policy remain. If Haley registers at least 30 per cent in Orange County suburbs.

Voters who register no party preference cannot vote in the Republican presidential primary, meaning the independents voters who have kept Haley afloat will not be able to vote in the GOP primary.

The dynamics in Harris County are similar. Harris County, the home of Houston, is flush with cash thanks to the state’s robust oil industry. Historically the home of the Bush dynasty after a Connecticut prep named George Herbert Walker Bush made his money in the energy sector and settled and became chairman of the Harris County GOP, helping to build the Texas GOP.

The University of Houston and Rice University are located there, though 33.2% have at least a bachelor’s degree. Degree attainment is lower there at $70,789, but the suburbs have higher earners. But the suburbs remain fairly upper-class and Barack Obama began to win the suburbs of Houston and it hasn’t looked back. In the same way, Ms Haley will need to overperform. Unlike California, Texas has an open primary, which means she can probably overperform there compared to Orange County.