Four things to watch for on Super Tuesday

Minnesota joins 15 other states holding presidential primaries on Super Tuesday. With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump the runaway favorites for their party’s nomination, the biggest question on Tuesday probably won’t be, “Who won?”

But here are four other questions we’ll be asking.

In Michigan last week, anger over the way Biden has handled Israel’s war in Gaza fueled an organized push for Democrats to mark their primary ballots “uncommitted.”

Biden won the primary with more than 600,000 votes but about 100,000 Democrats in Michigan cast “uncommitted” ballots, a warning sign in the state Biden won by about 154,000 votes in 2020.

A campaign called “Vote Uncommitted MN,” patterned on the Michigan effort, is backed by St. Paul City Council President Mitra Jalali, Minneapolis Council Member Aisha Chughtai and other local leaders.

“We want him to change course in the Middle East; we want him to change course in our foreign policy as it relates to Palestine,” Chughtai told reporters on Monday. “We want our president to listen to the majority of his party and the people in Minnesota and Michigan who were an important part of getting him elected four years ago.”

In 2020, “uncommitted” got only 2,612 votes in Minnesota’s Democratic presidential primary, compared with over 287,000 for Biden and 222,000 for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The uncommitted votes in Michigan came from cities like Dearborn, with a high proportion of Muslim residents. Ann Arbor and other college towns also put up big “uncommitted” numbers. Will Minnesota voters follow that pattern?

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is making the pitch to Republican voters that she can win women and independent voters in the suburbs who have turned away from Trump.

“He lost 40 percent of the Republican primary vote in all of the early states,” Haley said at a rally in Bloomington on Monday. You can’t win a general election if you’re alienating that many Republicans, she said.

Can Haley live up to her promise of bringing Republicans back to the fold? And where will those voters be?

State Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, Haley’s Minnesota campaign chair, has said she thought Haley could help flip some legislative districts, if Haley became the Republican nominee. Will the possibility of a different kind of national Republican Party be enough to get moderate Republican voters to turn out on Tuesday?

Where is Dean Phillips chipping away at Biden’s support, and by how much?

The Third District congressman barely made a dent in the South Carolina and Michigan primaries. Even after spending significant time and resources in New Hampshire, Phillips won just shy of 20% of the vote.

Biden’s name was not on the ballot in New Hampshire, but he still won almost 64% of the vote as a write-in candidate.

Will Phillips do any better in his home state? And how will his own district treat him? Phillips did not over-perform in New Hampshire places that most resemble his district, like the Boston exurban towns of Salem and Pelham, or the Edina-like Bedford, N.H.

Nikki Haley is the only presidential candidate who’s held a campaign event in Minnesota in 2024, with her Bloomington stop on Monday. Not even Phillips has campaigned in the state.

Nobody appears to have a fully built-out campaign that involves people making calls, knocking on doors and handing out yard signs to gin up excitement for the election.

Without that infrastructure, and without much interest in the lopsided races in either party, how many people will turn out to vote Tuesday, and where?

Biden won Minnesota in 2020 in large part because of high turnout in the metro area. If those voters are not that jazzed about supporting Biden in the primary — whether they stay home on Tuesday or vote uncommitted — could it mean they won’t be bothered to turn out in November?

The same question applies to Trump: What happens if his base is not that excited about voting this week?

Four years ago, turnout for Minnesota’s presidential primary was about 22.3% of registered voters, or more than 916,000 people. As of Thursday, not quite 74,000 people had voted early.