Former President Donald Trump won the Republican presidential primaries in Maine and at least five of the other states voting on Super Tuesday, effectively cementing a rematch with President Joe Biden in November.
Exit polls showed that Trump would easily defeat former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in Maine. The Bangor Daily News and its national election results partners at Decision Desk HQ called the Maine race for Trump and other states just as polls closed at 8 p.m.
The divisive Trump enters the spring in a decent position to recapture the White House. While his favorability rating has registered in the low 40s in national polls, that mark is higher than Biden’s approval. Voters are worried about Biden’s age of 81 after the Democrat supplanted the 77-year-old Trump as the oldest president to ever serve.
Biden ousted Trump in a 2020 election marked by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the former president’s false insistence that the race was “stolen.” The idea led Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to finalize the Electoral College count on Jan. 6, 2021.
Big-name Republicans in Congress criticized Trump, House Democrats quickly impeached him and a large field of Republicans assembled to run against him. Over months, Trump wore them down despite facing four separate criminal cases ranging from his conduct around the 2020 election to his businesses, all of which threaten his political future and his fortune.
Most of Trump’s former primary rivals have endorsed him, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as the top Republican alternative to him. Haley has stayed in the race despite winning only one contest so far among the party’s tiny electorate in Washington, D.C., insisting that the former president cannot beat Biden in November.
That message appealed to a broad crowd of anti-Trump Republicans and Biden skeptics, but it found no quarter within the conservative electorate that decides primaries. In Maine’s conservative 2nd Congressional District, the two freshman state lawmakers vying to oust Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden are touting their support of Trump as a central issue.
Roughly 44 percent of Republican voters in Super Tuesday states including Maine cited Trump’s main issue of immigration as the policy area most important to them, according to Decision Desk HQ’s exit poll. Haley led Trump only among independents and Democrats.
At the polls in Augusta on Tuesday, Scott Ingraham, a 62-year-old government worker, said Republicans were motivated to turn out for the former president after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ December decision to deem Trump ineligible for the ballot over his role in the Capitol riots.
He said he would have been open to voting for someone besides Trump if they were equal to him, but Haley did not fit the bill.
“She’s trying to screw things up right now,” Ingraham said. “He did good the last time, I thought, for the economy and everything.”