What to watch on Super Tuesday

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Hello Swampians, and welcome to the Monday before Super Tuesday. The FT will be live blogging tomorrow’s primaries in 15 states, with a mix of news, analysis and commentary from reporters and opinion writers.

Having now plugged our coverage, I can admit that the results themselves are going to be anticlimactic. Biden and Trump are clearly the presumptive nominees for their respective parties. But that doesn’t mean that the primaries aren’t worth following, particularly for what the exit polls will say about what’s motivating voters (for more on what that’s likely to be economically, see my column today).

One thing I’ll be watching for is a continuation of the trend we have seen among Republican primary voters, which is less support for Trump than you might expect. Sure, he’s getting 60 per cent or more of the primary vote (he got 68 per cent in Michigan) and Nikki Haley couldn’t even win her home state of South Carolina. But you can’t think of Trump as an ordinary primary contender. You must judge him as an incumbent, which means that he should be getting 80 per cent of the vote, maybe even more. Biden, for example, won 95 per cent of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina and over 80 per cent in Michigan, despite the pushback around US policy in Gaza.

Why is this? Because Trump’s extremism has alienated more conservatives than we might think. From stepping on personal freedoms with an anti-abortion and even anti-contraception stance, to alienating patriots by pulling back from support for Nato, to ignoring any remaining semblance of party independence by trying to put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee (which would presumably then use its money for only Trump-directed purposes), Trump is riding roughshod over everything that an independent conservative would care about. And we haven’t even gotten to the 91 criminal charges and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines that are surely making donors think hard about where their money might end up going.

The re-creation of the Republican Party into a kind of Trump death cult may backfire spectacularly. Republicans have hitched their wagon to a political meteor that may end up crashing in the desert somewhere. I was quite struck during a recent trip to Washington by how so many Republican politicos and thinkers I met with didn’t actually want to be called Republicans, but rather “conservatives.” There’s a big change moment coming, and the party is entirely unprepared for it, politically or ideologically (yes, there are green shoots there in the form of thinkers like Oren Cass and Julius Krein, but they are nascent — nobody has come up with anything to really replace Reaganism aside from Trump and Maga).

So, what might the Super Tuesday primaries tell us about all of this? Consider that in the 2016 primaries, Trump mostly outperformed polling forecasts. This time, he’s underperforming by several percentage points.

That said to me that there may be a hidden Biden vote, in the form of frustrated independents but also fed up Republicans. I think that’s been underplayed so far as a political story, probably due in part to the fact that journalists who missed the Trump phenomenon the first time around are reluctant to do the same this time. Peter, what do you think of my theory? And what will you be watching on Super Tuesday?

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• I was really struck by David Brooks’ piece about how today’s Maga message mirrors that of pessimistic Republicans in the 1930s. Yikes. I would say though that the world isn’t binary and two things can be true — buying real estate and some gold isn’t a bad idea in my opinion!

• Nicholas Wade, the former science editor of the NYT, is right to take the Wuhan lab theory seriously. It’s interesting that he had to write this in the WSJ, and troubling that our partisan divide seems to preclude serious thinking about the possibility that the virus was a product of laboratory synthesis.

• Two terrific takes on the market in the FT, one by our John Plender, on why Treasuries are just not as safe as we think in a world where US influence and economic power are shrinking, and another by Yves Bonzon on the investment firm Julius Baer. Bonzon argues that we actually aren’t in a tech bubble after all.

• In the FT, don’t miss US-China correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo’s lunch with General Mark Milley, who shares thoughts on Taiwan and Ukraine, and save room for Jemima Kelly’s latest romp through Maga Palm Beach. This woman is a great reporter — the “made in China” labels on the Super Bowl favours at the Trump International Golf Club are perfect.

The latest Swamp Notes podcast looks at Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s duelling trips to the US-Mexico border last week and who voters find more convincing on immigration. Listen here.

Peter Spiegel responds

Rana, what you have laid out here is essentially what the Haley campaign has been arguing for weeks: that Trump should be viewed as an incumbent, and an incumbent who cannot garner near unanimity of his own party is a wounded nominee indeed. And just because this has been a Haley campaign talking point doesn’t make it wrong. 

You and I are both old enough to remember the 1992 campaign, when right-wing media pundit Pat Buchanan took 37 per cent of the Republican vote in the New Hampshire primary against then-President George HW Bush. The Beltway commentariat immediately began sounding the death knell for Bush’s prospects in November. Compare that to the 43 per cent Haley got against Trump in New Hampshire last month and you can see why I’m prone to agree with you on this.

There’s one other thing you mentioned, Rana, that I wanted to focus on, though. It’s your mention of a “hidden Biden vote”, because it’s something I’ve been hearing about from our reporters out on the campaign trail. You describe them as “frustrated independents” or “fed up Republicans”. I’m not sure that analysis entirely captures it, though, because I think there’s a more issue-based reason for this phenomenon.

What I’ve been hearing is that many of these “secret Biden voters” are women in nominally Republican communities who are becoming genuinely fearful of their ability to access basic reproductive healthcare services, now that Republican ideologues appear to be going after what were once viewed as the most routine of obstetric and gynaecological procedures. Witness the recent ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court on in vitro fertilisation. 

At this point, these “secret Biden voter” reports remain anecdotal. But it doesn’t take a leap of logic to understand why a large number of Republican women may decide to vote for Biden without admitting it to pollsters — or their families.