US President Joe Biden and Donald Trump were striding ahead in the Democrat and Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, cementing a seemingly inevitable rematch in the November general election.
Mr Biden and Mr Trump had each won Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
Mr Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Utah, Vermont and Iowa.
But Mr Biden's easy wins belied a clear warning.
Tens of thousands of Democrats voted either “uncommitted” or for other candidates in a sign that anger over the President's handling of the Israel-Gaza war is spreading beyond Michigan, where 100,000 Democrats last week voted against him.
Strategists have been keenly watching states such as Minnesota, which – like Michigan – has large Arab and Muslim-American populations.
Minnesota has 75 Democratic and 39 Republican National Convention delegates.
Mr Biden defeated his challenger Dean Phillips by a wide margin, securing 56 delegates to Mr Phillips' zero, while Mr Trump also defeated Nikki Haley, with a 16 to zero delegate count, according to NBC.
AP said both Mr Biden and Mr Trump had won in the state two hours after polls closed.
It is unusual to go into Super Tuesday with a fairly clear idea of who will come out on top, said Virginia Kase Solomon, president and chief executive of Common Cause, a non-partisan voting rights organisation with more than 1.5 million members.
“Normally, by Super Tuesday in a presidential election year, we don't necessarily have a presumptive presidential nominee. But we know that this is by no means an ordinary year,” Ms Kase Solomon said.
Mr Trump and his Make American Great Again campaign have been putting increasing pressure on Ms Haley to drop out.
But she appears committed to staying in the race until the Republican National Convention in July, and has received a substantial amount of donor money to prop up her campaign, despite near impossible odds of victory over the former president.
Ms Kase Solomon emphasised that Super Tuesday will be “a test run for the general election” in terms of the new rules and challenges US voters face at the ballot box.
“It's an opportunity for us to kind of see where we need to triage, where we need to inoculate, and where we need to do better and supporting election officials and voters at the ballot box,” she said.
Mr Trump's victories included Maine, one of three states that had sought to keep him off the ballot over his push to overturn the 2020 election and the assault on the US Capitol.
The earliest that either candidate can become their party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Mr Trump and March 19 for Biden.
However, both men are already signalling publicly that they are looking forward to facing each other again.
Inside the Arab American campaign to unseat US President Joe Biden in 2024
