Super Tuesday! If you are a political junkie like me, Super Tuesday has always been a big deal in the Presidential Election cycle. In the past, it has had the feeling of a pivotal playoff game leading up to the Super Bowl.
This year, the people of fifteen states will go to the polls to vote for their preferred candidate to stand for election for President of the United States, the leader of the free world and the most powerful person on earth. (Allegedly).
We’ve got the cable news shows on a four-screen split, are awaiting the first exit polls, and are gearing up for all the fireworks to come.
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Super Tuesday is a relatively recent development in Presidential Politics; the first time the phrase was used was in 1980 regarding the primaries of just three states: Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.
In 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson did well enough on Super Tuesday to squash Senator Al Gore’s chances and helped lock in the eventual Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.
In 2008, Super Tuesday did not break the deadlock between Democratic hopefuls Senator Barrack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton, but Senator John McCain solidified his lead over Governor Mitt Romney and never looked back.
In 2020, Vice President Joe Biden established his candidacy and eventual victory over Senator Bernie Sanders and went on to win the nomination. Major moves in campaigns occur on Super Tuesday, where eventual nominees’ and Presidents’ campaigns often make big news on the big day.
None of that will happen today. One of the biggest political spectator events of the four year cycle will more resemble a Harlem Globetrotters game. We’ll be tuning in to see not who wins – those are all foregone conclusions in our absurd primary campaign that was over before it started – but to watch the players try to impress us with skilled tricks on the court. Indeed, playing against the ‘Trotters today will be Nikki Haley, who, after winning the Republican caucus in Washington DC (with a whopping 1200 votes in her favor), fits the bill for the Washington Generals.
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Show up, score some points, but let the crowd have its fill of circus antics during the game by the stars of the show, the Globetrotters. Hopefully, we can at least get some split-screen coverage of some candidates bashing each other tonight.
But what is clear, and has been for some time, is that Donald Trump is the nominee for President of the Republican Party. The only news by him or Nikki Haley today will be based upon the silly “expectations” – who met arbitrary expectations set by so-called experts and who didn’t.
I find the entire expectations game in these political contests – like public company earnings releases, economic news like GDP or CPI, or any sports contest anywhere – to be a trivial, nap-inducing caricature of actual political discourse. The expectations are set by people who pretend to know something we don’t and who, despite invariably being wrong, move on to their next prediction.
We spend the whole cycle talking about missed expectations rather than what actually happened. And the easily predictable delta between the expectations and reality becomes the narrative. Rinse and repeat.
Verily, I say to you, what would happen if they held a primary and nobody came?
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As our candidates for the major parties for president have been known to be Joe Biden and Donald Trump for some time, the whole event was a waste of time. Imagine devising a system whereby all of the voters, the voting booths, the poll workers, the vote counters and all of the media show up for a major event that used to have meaning, but the conclusion now is already known.
Another waste of resources, time and effort, and a waste of our democratic process. When we hold contests whose outcomes are already determined we pretend at democracy, we don’t practice it. Just as Vladimir Putin is expected to be reelected as “President” of Russia in their upcoming election. It is known. Why do we never compare the expectations of a thriving democratic election process to what we get in reality?
On the Democratic side, the President’s few challengers and his party seem to be resigned to the fact that he will be the nominee. Despite large swaths of protest votes (100,000 uncommitted in Michigan), terrible polling (New York Times/Sienna poll showed only 18% of voters think Biden’s policies have helped them, and 45% of Democrats say someone else should be the nominee) and clear questions about his mental health and ability to finish a second term, no major Democratic politician is calling for a change of nominee, at least in public.
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But betting sites are starting to show cracks in that story. Studies find that betting markets fare better than polls in predicting vote outcomes. At Election Betting Odds, a betting aggregator site, President Trump has a commanding 20-point lead over President Biden for the eventual victory, 52.2% to 31.6%.
At the same site, the betting odds show a 13% chance Biden drops out; it further shows that if given the nomination, Gavin Newsom has a 61% chance of beating Donald Trump in the fall, 22 points ahead of President Biden’s 38% chance:
This is the real story to watch. If President Biden continues to suffer from problems within his own party, the pressure will continue to mount on his candidacy for the nomination.
One thing is for sure, President Biden has more pressure to perform two nights from now in the State of the Union address than he ever has in his career – perhaps more than any of his Presidential colleagues – he has the worst approval rating in history after all.
The speech could be his last State of the Union, and he needs to have a gaffe-free, brain-freeze-free performance to have any hope of turning the tsunami-sized tide in which he is currently awash.
Quite frankly, 90 minutes or so is more important to the President’s future than any vote cast on what used to be an exciting Super Tuesday event. The good news for the President’s team is that, for the most part, he still seems to be able to read a teleprompter passingly well. It will be a must-watch television; you can comfortably skip the coverage today without missing much.
Justin Weller is the Founder and Editor of The Country, and host of the podcast The Country with Justin Weller. Prior, he was a general manager and sales leader in startup and Big Tech firms, interned on Capitol Hill, and was a Contributing Editor at mxdwn.com. This piece is republished from The Country
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Tampa Free Press.
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