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Donald Trump has predicted he will sweep “every state” on Super Tuesday and said he is fully focused on the November election against his presumed opponent, Joe Biden.

“My focus is really at this point, it’s on Biden,” Trump said on Fox News.

We should win almost every state today, I think every state. … But we [should’] really look at Biden.

Share’I am a Republican’: Haley again rejects third-party presidential bid

Nikki Haley has once again rejected a third-party presidential bid as Donald Trump said she had “no path” to the GOP nomination.

Haley, speaking to Fox News this morning, said:

I have said many, many times I would not run as an independent. I would not run as No Labels because I am a Republican. And that’s who I’ve always been. That’s what I’m going to do.

The third-party presidential movement No Labels plans to meet after Super Tuesday to decide whether it will go forward with plans to launch an independent candidacy.

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Updated at 16.57 CET

Third-ranking Senate Republican Barrasso won’t run to replace McConnell

Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming has decided not to run for Senate Republican leader to succeed Mitch McConnell, and instead will run for the No. 2 position of whip, according to multiple reports.

Barrasso, 71, is the third-ranking Senate Republican as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and relatively popular with the Republican right. He endorsed Donald Trump in January and has the closes relationship with the former president of the “three Johns”.

His decision not to run for Senate GOP leader means the race is now effectively between senators John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas, although Barrasso’s departure could pave the way for another Trump ally to throw their hat in the ring.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida met with Trump on Monday night amid speculation that he could launch a bid for leader. Trump has also privately urged Steve Daines of Montana to run for the position, Axios reported.

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Updated at 16.57 CET

Historically, Taylor Swift, who has urged her followers to head to the polls for Super Tuesday, has been cautious about dipping her toes into political discourse.

Her most pointed involvement has included a 2018 plea to fans to vote for Democrats in a Tennessee election, against Republican Marsha Blackburn. Since then, she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and even spoke out against then-president Donald Trump that same year.

Outside of these instances, like on Tuesday, Swift has used her platform repeatedly to tell fans to vote. Notably, voter registration soars by the tens of thousands after each of her get-out-the-vote Instagram posts.

It remains unclear if Swift will use her platform this year to do more than tell her fans to vote, but there’s certainly an appetite for her to do so – and an appetite for her to keep quiet.

In a poll conducted by the Guardian earlier this year, one Swift fan said “her stance and/or endorsement is one that I care about as much as my granddaughter does.

I would like to hear her speak out in support of human rights for all, especially women. And to support the asylum-seeking refugees risking their lives to contribute their hard work to the US. That’s what actually makes America great.

For me, Taylor Swift’s endorsement holds more influence than any man in DC or in the media. Why wouldn’t her opinion matter to me?

Also this year, there have already been many right-wing conspiracy theories flourishing online that suggest Swift is a covert asset to bolster Biden and that she and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, are a set-up to bolster Biden; allies of Trump even pledged a “holy war” against Swift if she sides with the Democrats in November.

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Taylor Swift has urged her supporters to head to the polls today in a rare political message on Instagram.

“Today, March 5, is the Presidential Primary in Tennessee and 16 other states and territories,” Swift wrote in an Instagram story.

I wanted to remind you guys to vote the people who most represent YOU into power. If you haven’t already, make a plan to vote today.

Whether you’re in Tennessee or somewhere else in the US, check your polling places and times at vote.org.

Taylor Swift performs during “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at the National Stadium on 2 March in Singapore. Photograph: Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

Swift has not publicly endorsed a presidential candidate this cycle, but she previously backed Joe Biden in 2020 and supported Democratic candidates in Tennessee.

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Updated at 15.59 CET

The US supreme court ruled on Monday that Donald Trump should appear on Colorado’s primary ballot, overturning a ruling by the state supreme court that said the former president could not run because he had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Trump was wrongly removed from Colorado’s primary ballot last year, the court’s unanimous decision found, in a novel interpretation of section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office.

The court wrote in an unsigned opinion:

We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.

Congress, the court said, had to enact the procedures for disqualification under Section 3. The court added:

State-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that the President … represent[s] all the voters in the Nation.

The decision was a victory for Trump, clearing the way for him to appear on the ballot in all 50 states.

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While a lot of attention is on Super Tuesday voting, talks are still underway in Egypt for a potential temporary ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and the international criminal court in The Hague, Netherlands, has issued arrest warrants for two senior Russian military figures accused of being responsible for a missile campaign targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure between October 2022 and March 2023, two years into Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Our colleagues are following all of that news via stories and live blogs. Right now we have global live blogs running out of London on the latest situation in the Middle East, which you can follow here, and between Ukraine and Russia, here.

In the US, NBC now reports that strong comments US vice president Kamala Harris has made in the last 48 hours, calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and decrying the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza would have been even stronger if she’d had her way.

Harris met with Benny Gantz in Washington, DC, yesterday, a member of the Israeli war cabinet and a centrist rival of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in the US over Netanyahu’s objections.

My colleague in Washington, Léonie Chao-Fong, will take the blog baton now and bring you the news as it happens over the coming hours. Our colleagues Chris Stein and Maanvi Singh will take over the evening’s Super Tuesday political climax.

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Updated at 15.23 CET

Joe Biden is reportedly eager, and pushing behind the scenes of his re-election campaign, for a “much more aggressive approach” to the 2024 contest for the White House that revolves around going “for Donald Trump’s jugular,” political news site Axios reports this morning.

It’s a fascinating review of signals from the Biden camp and is based on a conviction from the US president that a great way to unsettle Trump, the Republican frontrunner to be his rival in November, is taunting him as “a loser”, the outlet says.

As a famously thin-skinned former president, Trump is believed by Biden, according to what he has reportedly told friends, to be “wobbly, both intellectually and emotionally, and will explode if Biden mercilessly gigs and goads him — ‘go haywire in public’,” as one adviser put it to Axios.

Apparently Biden is “looking for a fight” and his “instincts tell him to let it fly when warning about the consequences of Trump winning the presidency again. Biden told The New Yorker that Trump would refuse to admit losing, again, Axios reports.

The Scranton scrapper. President Joe Biden at a campaign rally last month in Las Vegas, Nevada, ahead that state’s voting in the primary season. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Who can forget that in the 2020 campaign in which he won the White House, Biden weirdly called a woman on the campaign trail in New Hampshire a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier”?

His direct attacks on Trump and the hard right Make America Great Again (Maga) movement since last year have become much more pointed and effective, however.

Maga Maga: supporters of Donald Trump listen to instructions before a ‘‘Primary Election Maga Cruise” rally in California on Sunday, heading from the Trump National Gold Club in Rancho Palos Verdes to Huntington Beach. Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/ReutersShare

Updated at 14.45 CET

Voting under way in Super Tuesday primary contests

The polls are open and voting is under way in some states as millions head to the ballot box on this Super Tuesday, the largest day for voting for both Democrats and Republicans before the November presidential election.

People are already casting their ballots in person in eastern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and others, also further midwest in Minnesota and Iowa and polls will be opening soon in places such as Colorado, then further west later.

Voters involved today are in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The territory of American Samoa will be caucusing.

More than a third of available delegates in the presidential nominating contest are up for grabs on Super Tuesday.Voters taking part today in the biggest day of the primary season to choose their nominee for president, and their choices in other, down-ballot contests.

This blog has now passed to the US from my colleague in London, Martin Belam, and we’ll be taking you through the day and evening as voting continues, then polls close and results start to come in.

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Updated at 15.28 CET

Martin Pengelly

Here is another excerpt from Martin Pengelly’s analysis piece about the key issues at stake in this November’s presidential election, which today’s Super Tuesday results will all but confirm will be a re-run of Trump v Biden.

Democrats are clear: they will focus on Republican attacks on abortion rights, from the Dobbs v Jackson supreme court ruling that struck down Roe v Wade to the mifepristone case, draconian bans in red states and candidates’ support for such bans.

For Democrats, it makes tactical sense: the threat to women’s reproductive rights is a rare issue on which the party polls very strongly and it has clearly fuelled a series of electoral wins, even in conservative states, since Dobbs. The recent Alabama IVF ruling, which said embryos should be legally treated as people, showed the potency of such tactics again: from Trump down, Republicans scrambled to deny they want to deny treatment used by millions to have the children they want.

Trump, however, clearly finds it hard not to boast about appointing three justices who voted to strike down Roe, and to entertain ideas about harsher abortion bans. Expect Biden and Democrats to hit and keep on hitting.

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It isn’t just the presidential nomination on Super Tuesday ballot papers up and down the US today. One of the most keenly watched contests will be the primary for the US Senate seat in California vacated by Dianne Feinstein.

It has been quite an unusual race. The Democratic frontrunner is Rep Adam Schiff, who faces rivals from his party in the shape of Rep Barbara Lee of Oakland and Rep Katie Porter of Irvine. But also in the picture is former Los Angeles Dodgers player Steve Garvey for the Rpublicans.

Seema Mehta has been following the contest for the LA Times, and earlier this week she wrote:

Once Garvey entered the race, he did not mount a traditional campaign. He hasn’t held any big rallies or public meet-and-greets with voters around the state. He spent no money on television ads, never rented a campaign bus and declined to do endorsement interviews with California’s major newspapers.

In the final weekend before election day, the leading Democrats running for the Senate seat barnstormed the state, with Schiff holding seven public events, Lee attending four and Porter participating in two. As his Democratic opponents seized the last opportunity to woo voters, Garvey was at home in Palm Desert, visible to the public only through TV ads paid for by Schiff and his supporters and a brief Fox News interview.

And why is Schiff running attack ads against him? It may just be a cunning ruse. Mehta continues:

Schiff’s political ads portray Garvey both as a loyalist of former president Trump and the Democratic candidate’s greatest threat in the California Senate race. While those appear to be attacks on Garvey, they probably will increase his appeal to California Republicans and allow him to secure enough votes in the 5 March primary to advance to the fall election.

The two candidates who receive the most votes in the primary, regardless of their political party, will face off in November. A recent poll shows that, in a one-on-one matchup, Schiff would have a much easier time defeating Garvey than Porter, a fellow Democrat.

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