Trump will have all but secured his party’s nomination after Super Tuesday, and Biden will use Thursday’s State of the Union address as a springboard to offer up a vision for a second term to millions of Americans before traveling in the days after the speech to battleground states Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Both men and their campaigns see it as being in their respective best interests for the general election cycle to kick into gear as quickly as possible, albeit for different reasons.
Trump and his team are ready to fully move on from nagging questions about Nikki Haley winning thousands of votes in the GOP primary, and the Trump campaign is eager to fully merge with the Republican National Committee (RNC) so it can bolster its lagging fundraising.
The Biden campaign, meanwhile, has insisted it will benefit once Trump is definitively the GOP nominee, a reality officials have argued millions of Americans have yet to realize.
“The next week is a big week,” said Jim Kessler, vice president of policy at the left-leaning think tank Third Way. “The Republican primary should be over at that point, and the president has the State of the Union. To me, the State of the Union is where Biden kicks off the general election.”
Sixteen states will head to the polls Tuesday to vote in presidential primaries. While Trump and Biden are on a collision course for a rematch in November, Tuesday’s results will allocate enough delegates to solidify that reality.
Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, is still in the race, but she has been unable to point to a single state where she can beat Trump.