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It’s still early, but former President Donald Trump could well win every single Republican presidential nominating contest — a feat that hasn’t been accomplished by a non-incumbent presidential candidate in more than two decades.
This weekend, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley may have her best chance to stop that from happening.
So far, Trump has racked up a 5-0 record against Haley in the states with the first primaries and caucuses, including Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and Michigan.
The current delegate count stands at Trump 110, Haley 20 — with looming contests in the likes of Idaho (on Saturday), Washington, D.C. (with primary voting concluding on Sunday), North Dakota (on Monday) and more than a dozen primaries and caucuses (on Super Tuesday). In particular, Washington, D.C., where Trump got just 14% in a very low-turnout 2016 primary, provides an opportunity for Haley to notch her first win of 2024.
Marco Rubio, with a political coalition then similar to Haley’s, won the district in 2016.
A pair of Super Tuesday states also could be opportunities for Haley: Virginia (where she campaigned on Thursday) and Massachusetts (where registered Republicans made up less than half of the electorate in its 2016 GOP primary).
Otherwise, Trump looks set to run the GOP table, making the 2024 Republican race the least competitive presidential nominating fight since 2000.
That was the last time that a non-incumbent presidential candidate went undefeated in primaries and caucuses in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, when then-Vice President Al Gore did it.
The closest that Democratic rival Bill Bradley got to Gore was in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, where he lost by a few percentage points.
In 2004, Democrat John Kerry easily won his party’s nomination after his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he still lost North Carolina and South Carolina to John Edwards (who hailed from the Tar Heel State), Oklahoma to Wesley Clark, and Vermont to home-state favorite Howard Dean, the former governor.
In 2008, eventual GOP nominee John McCain traded early primary and caucus victories with Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battled until the very end of that cycle’s Democratic race.
In 2012, Romney lost contests against Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich before securing the GOP presidential nomination.
And in 2016 and 2020, nominees Trump, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden lost their fair share of primaries and caucuses to their rivals.
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