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Former President Donald Trump, at last, is the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, after notching a majority of the delegates to the GOP’s July convention.
Trump crossed the threshold of 1,215 delegates on Tuesday night, according to The Associated Press, as he won elections in Georgia, Mississippi, Hawaii and Washington, following a near-sweep of Super Tuesday states a week before.
The first candidate to enter the Republican presidential primary, Trump enjoyed front-runner status throughout the campaign, and his eventual nomination seemed inevitable for months as he dominated public polling and then early primaries.
His last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, exited the race last week, after winning contests only in Washington, D.C., and Vermont.
Now, the race pits Trump against President Joe Biden, who also clinched his party’s nomination on Tuesday.
A redux of the Biden-Trump faceoff will test the limits of campaign finance and decorum in a modern presidential contest. Trump is currently in the lead, both in national and battleground polling in recent months, but he lags behind Biden in fundraising. He also faces a number of legal challenges ahead, including a trial over hush money payments to a porn star that begins in New York on March 25.
In a Super Tuesday speech from his Mar-a-Lago club — and before Haley had exited the race — Trump last week had already begun to call for the party to unite around him as the nominee.
“We want to have unity, and we’re going to have unity, and it’s going to happen very quickly,” Trump said.
For that to happen, Trump will have to persuade some Haley voters, who skewed independent, to back him in November. Haley has not endorsed Trump, and at least some of her supporters have told pollsters they will not support Trump in November.
But influential donors and the party infrastructure are already lining up behind the former president. Members of the Republican National Committee on Friday declared that Trump was the party’s presumptive nominee, doing so moments before Ronna McDaniel resigned as chair so that her Trump-selected replacement, Michael Whatley, could be installed. The committee also signed off on Trump’s pick for co-chair, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
Trump’s senior adviser Chris LaCivita is among the other Trump staff now running the RNC as Trump seeks to ensure the committee offers its full support in his general election rematch against Biden.
Republicans will gather in Milwaukee July 15-18, where Trump will formally be nominated. Trump’s delegates are bound by RNC rules to support him in the first round of voting on the nomination.
Meanwhile, Trump and Biden both have already pivoted to the general election and are aggressively campaigning, including this week over Social Security and other government spending.
