Super Tuesday sets up Trump and Biden for a 2024 rematch

PALM BEACH, Fla. — All signs point to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump racking up enough delegates in the "Super Tuesday" contests — held in 16 states and American Samoa — to all but mathematically secure a rematch of their 2020 election fight.

For more than a year, polls have shown Americans anticipating a sequel with the kind of eagerness typically reserved for a drug-free colonoscopy. But Republicans show little interest in stripping their standard from Trump's hands, and Biden, like most modern incumbents, faces no serious competition for his party's nod.

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"The 2024 nominations may have unknowingly been locked up since November 2020," Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist, said.

"With a former president and an incumbent president, both parties have dug in and are gearing up for a rematch which looks to be vicious, vindictive and possibly vile," he said, noting that the winner would not be eligible to run in 2028. That "will ultimately lead to the oldest ever inaugurated president, who will serve out their lame duck term."

Recent polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden in the national popular vote. But given Biden's narrow electoral-vote margin in 2020 — he won by about 43,000 votes spread over three states — when he led Trump by 4.5 percentage points in popular votes, some Democrats worry that his advantage has disappeared.

Their fears were underscored last week when Bloomberg News and the Morning Consult released a battery of swing state polls showing Trump ahead of Biden in each of the key battlegrounds that are expected to collectively determine the winner.

"Biden starts in a clear deficit in nearly every battleground state and