In a normal presidential election year in the United States, the primary season helps to winnow down the fields of Democratic and Republican candidates, until there is only one of each left.
But the 2024 primaries were different. Even before the first state vote was held, the outcome was clear: President Joe Biden was headed to a rematch against former President Donald Trump.
“This primary season was particularly unusual,” Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, said.
“In part, that was because there seemed little doubt as to who would be the nominee for each party.”
On Tuesday, the presidential primary season winds to an inconspicuous close, with low-stakes votes in the final four states: Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota, plus the District of Columbia. Only Guam and the Virgin Islands vote later.
But experts said the greatest takeaway from this year’s presidential primaries was not who would ultimately nab each party’s nomination. It was what each state-level vote revealed about the campaigns to come.
A December survey from Reuters and Ipsos, for example, found that 61 percent of Republicans supported Trump. His next closest rivals, DeSantis and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, only marshalled 11 percent each.
As a result, even before the first primary vote was cast, Republican candidates began dropping out of the race. Shortly after the Iowa caucus, the field contracted even more, leaving only Trump and Haley in the running for the second contest of the primary calendar, in New Hampshire.
For Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University, the lesson was that little could dent Trump’s standing among Republican voters.
Trump, after all, faced four criminal indictments during the primary calendar. One of those indictments led to a trial that concluded last month with convictions on 34 felony counts, related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film star.
“We have learned that court cases and extra-marital sex and ‘payoffs’ can’t shake support by candidates with a passionate base,” Schmidt told Al Jazeera.
Still, Schmidt added that it was “very strange” that a high-profile candidate like Trump can joke “about becoming a dictator” — and face few repercussions at the ballot box.
Some critics have pointed out that Haley’s attempts to challenge Trump exposed weaknesses in the former president’s bid for re-election. For instance, she beat Trump in two moderate-leaning areas, the District of Columbia and Vermont.
And even after suspending her campaign in March, Haley continued to draw votes away from the Trump campaign. She scored 21 percent of the vote in Indiana’s primary, and more than 16 percent in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania.
With November’s presidential race likely to come down to a few key battleground states, those “zombie votes” for Haley’s long-defunct campaign were widely interpreted as a signal of displeasure with Trump.
Still, months after leaving the race, Haley announced last month that she, too, would vote for Trump — an indication that even the former president’s Republican critics were willing to back him.
“The Republican primaries have taught us that Donald Trump has a death grip on his party,” said Richard F Bensel, a professor of government at Cornell University.
”There is no one in the party who can effectively stand up against him, and even his strongest opponents, such as Nikki Haley, have ultimately capitulated as they pursued their own individual ambitions.”
Biden ‘difficult to replace’
On the Democratic side, the protest vote has been even more prominent.Biden, the incumbent president, has faced backlash from within his own party over issues like Israel’s war in Gaza and immigration. The Gaza war, in particular, spurred the formation of a protest movement centred on the primary season.
Starting with February’s Michigan primary, organisers pushed Democratic voters to select options like the “uncommitted” category on their ballots, rather than throw their support behind Biden.
