From our correspondent in Washington,
In sixteen states across the United States that voted simultaneously in primaries or caucuses during the day of Tuesday, the famous Super Tuesday - in other words
Super Tuesday
- voters rallied behind the two figures of their respective parties.
Their nomination as candidates for their parties is now almost certain.
On the Democratic side, Joe Biden won every vote, like virtually every outgoing president, with the anecdotal exception of the tiny territory of Samoa.
But this victory is more resigned than enthusiastic.
Democrats who are concerned about his age and his ability to campaign again, before occupying the presidential office for four more years, have no alternative to his candidacy.
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On the Republican side, the day was the crowning moment of Trump's campaign.
“We call it Super Tuesday for good reason!”
Trump said triumphantly in front of his guests at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida,
“we've never seen anything like it, results too decisive,”
he trumpeted.
His massive success in fifteen of the sixteen states on
Super Tuesday
adds to the series of victories won since January, and brings him one step closer to the Republican Party nomination.
The only downside to this picture is that the victory of her last rival, Nikki Haley in Vermont, has just served as a symbolic reminder that her domination over the Republican Party is not total.
Those he contemptuously nicknames RINOs,
Republicans in name only
, traditional conservatives, even in the minority, remain reluctant to the takeover of their party by the MAGA movement.
Advance impossible to catch up
More than a third of the delegates from each party were at stake during the day.
Polls were held simultaneously in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia, as well as Alaska for Republicans and the territory of Samoa for Democrats.
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The large majority won by Trump in almost every state gives him an impossible lead to catch up.
The majority system in effect in most Republican primaries awards all of the state's delegates to the winning candidate, unlike Democrats, who more often award delegates proportionally.
But Nikki Haley's scores, which sometimes reach 30% in states like Colorado or Virginia, remain a worrying factor for Trump, who must bring his entire camp together if he wants to win the November election.
“We want unity
,” Trump said, without specifying whether it was unity of the party or unity of the country,
“and we will have it very soon.
Success will bring unity.
This time he refrained from launching into a diatribe against Nikki Haley.
He delivered a general campaign speech directed at Joe Biden,
“the worst president in American history”
.
He repeated his apocalyptic descriptions of an America on the verge of ruin, invaded by hordes of illegal migrants, which is only waiting for his election to recover and reconnect with the golden age that was his first mandate.
Haley refuses to fall in line
Trump continues to disrupt everything in his path.
Respecting neither the rules, nor the forms nor the customs, he refused to debate with the other candidates in the Republican primaries, preferring to be acclaimed by the crowds of his supporters.
All his rivals ended up giving up, with the sole exception of Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the UN.
Today its only rival.
She refuses to fall into line.
His campaign is against both Trump and Biden.
It plays on voters' reluctance to see the 2020 election replayed with two candidates, aged 81 for Biden and 77 for Trump.
A sign of her obstinacy, Haley recently returned to her commitment made at the start of the primary to support Trump if he was nominated by the party.
“I will make the decision I want
,” she said Sunday on NBC.
She also said she wasn't sure whether re-elected Trump would respect the Constitution.
" I do not know.
You always want to think he will, but I don't know.
When you talk about revenge, what does that mean?
Only he can answer this question.”