There are a few ways to look at yesterday's presidential primaries on Super Tuesday. For one thing, the results reveal the relative strength of the front-runners and their challengers. For the Democrats, Joe Biden is running as an incumbent president, without serious opposition in his party. Donald Trump, as an ex-president, holds a similar advantage over Nikki Haley, who, after Trump's victories in Texas, California and 12 other states on Tuesday, is expected to drop out of the race. But, as the editorial board writes on Wednesday morning, this presidential primary also represents something new and dangerous in American politics: the conquest of the Republican Party by a leader who has turned it into a vehicle for his own ambitions above all else. "In a traditional presidential primary contest, victory represents a democratic mandate, in which the winner enjoys popular legitimacy, conferred by the party's voters, but also accepts that his defeated rivals and their competing views have a place within the party. Mr. Trump no longer does, having used the primary contest as a tool for purging the party of dissent." This matters to everyone, as the editorial argues. A Republican Party without competing views can't fulfill its function in a healthy democracy — it can't govern, it can't hold its leader accountable, and it can't even deliver what its own supporters want. Whatever your political affiliation, I urge you to consider what this means for our country. "Tuning out is a luxury that no American, regardless of party, can afford," the editorial notes. "Mr. Trump in 2024 would be the nominee of a very different Republican Party — one that has lost whatever power it once had to hold him in check."
Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Opinion Today: What Trump’s primary victories mean
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