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Donald Trump and Joe Biden each secured enough delegates to clinch their parties’ presidential nominations on Tuesday night, setting up a rematch of the 2020 race for the White House in November.
According to the Associated Press, Trump gained sufficient backing for the Republican nomination after winning a primary contest in Washington on Tuesday. Earlier in the evening, Biden won the Democratic nomination process after prevailing in the Georgia primary.
The comfortable wins for both candidates have demonstrated their dominance over their respective parties. They have also masked some weaknesses on both sides that will make the 2024 election a bitter battle in which the candidate who suffers the fewest defections may prevail.
Trump released a three-minute video on social media touting his “great day of victory” on Tuesday night and said it was time to “get back to work” because Biden “must be defeated”.
“Our nation is failing, we’re a nation that’s in serious decline,” he said. “We’re going to turn it around, we’re going to ‘drill baby drill’, we’re going to close our borders.”
In a statement earlier on Tuesday, Biden sought to highlight the high stakes involved in the US election.
“Freedom and democracy are at risk here at home in a way they have not been since the Civil War,” he said. “Donald Trump is running a campaign of resentment, revenge, and retribution that threatens the very idea of America. He is glorifying dictators and pledging to become one himself on day one.”
Trump leads Biden nationally by 1.7 percentage points, giving him a slight edge at this stage in the race, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.
Trump faced the strongest opposition in the Republican primaries from Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who dropped out of the race last week. Her ability to win over significant chunks of the moderate and independent centre-right electorate has raised alarm bells among some Republicans about Trump’s chances in the general election.
Haley has so far stopped short of endorsing Trump. In the Georgia primary on Tuesday, she won 13.2 per cent, or nearly 78,000, of the Republican vote.
Biden has faced much weaker opposition in Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman, and Marianne Williamson, an author. But he has been forced to deal with a series of protest votes, namely in Michigan, where more than 100,000 Democrats voted for “uncommitted” instead of the president to show their dismay at his policies on Israel’s war in Gaza.
Biden, 81, has also been trying to fend off criticism — mainly from Republicans but even some Democrats — that he is too old to serve another White House term. During his State of the Union speech to Congress last week, Biden made an energetic re-election pitch against Trump, who is 77 and faces 91 criminal charges in federal and state courts, including for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
Because he is an incumbent president running for re-election, Biden had already secured the backing of the Democratic National Committee, the party apparatus, last year, allowing him to build his campaign and make an early fundraising push that has eclipsed Trump’s so far.
Trump hopes to catch up. Last week he moved to place his allies, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, at the helm of the Republican National Committee in order to cement his control over the party and try to outflank Democrats in the money race.
