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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were sweeping the coast-to-coast contests on Super Tuesday, all but cementing a November rematch and increasing pressure on the former president’s last major rival, Nikki Haley, to leave the Republican race.
Biden and Trump had each won Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Maine, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Massachusetts. Biden also won the Democratic primaries in Vermont and Iowa.
Haley’s strongest performance was in Vermont, where she was essentially tied with Trump in early results. But the former president carried other states that might have been favorable to Haley such as Virginia and Maine, which have large swaths of moderate voters like those who have backed her in previous primaries.
Not enough states will have voted until later this month for Trump or Biden to formally become their parties’ presumptive nominees. But the primary’s biggest day made their rematch a near certainty. Both the 81-year-old Biden and the 77-year-old Trump continue to dominate their parties despite facing questions about age and neither having broad popularity across the general electorate.
Haley, who has argued both Biden and Trump are too old to return to the White House, was spending election night watching results in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, where she lives. Her campaign website doesn’t list any upcoming events. Still, her aides insisted that the mood at her watch party was “jubilant.”
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, meanwhile, was packed for a victory party that featured hors d’oeuvres including empanadas and baked brie. Among those attending were staff and supporters, including the rapper Forgiato Blow and former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The crowd erupted as Fox News, playing on screens around the ballroom, announced that the former president had won North Carolina’s GOP primary.
While much of the focus is on the presidential race, there were also important down-ballot contests. The governor’s race took shape in North Carolina, where Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein will face off in a state that both parties are fiercely contesting ahead of November.
California voters were choosing candidates who will compete to fill the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein. And in Los Angeles, a progressive prosecutor attempted to fend off an intense reelection challenge in a contest that could serve as a barometer of the politics of crime.
The earliest either Biden or Trump can become his party’s presumptive nominee is March 12 for Trump and March 19 for Biden. But both are already signaling publicly that they are looking forward to facing each other again.
“We have to beat Biden — he is the worst president in history,” Trump said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.”
Biden countered with a pair of radio interviews aimed at shoring up his support among Black voters, who helped anchor his 2020 coalition.
“If we lose this election, you’re going to be back with Donald Trump,” Biden said on the “DeDe in the Morning” show hosted by DeDe McGuire. “The way he talks about, the way he acted, the way he has dealt with the African American community, I think, has been shameful.”
Despite Biden’s and Trump’s domination of their parties, polls make it clear that the broader electorate does not want this year’s general election to be identical to the 2020 race. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds a majority of Americans don’t think either Biden or Trump has the necessary mental acuity for the job.
“Both of them failed, in my opinion, to unify this country,” said Brian Hadley, 66, of Raleigh, North Carolina.
The final days before Tuesday demonstrated the unique nature of this year’s campaign. Rather than barnstorming the states holding primaries, Biden and Trump held rival events last week along the U.S.-Mexico border, each seeking to gain an advantage in the increasingly fraught immigration debate.
After the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Monday to restore Trump to primary ballots following attempts to ban him for his role in helping spark the Capitol riot, Trump pointed to the 91 criminal counts against him to accuse Biden of weaponizing the courts.
“Fight your fight yourself,” Trump said. “Don’t use prosecutors and judges to go after your opponent.”
Biden delivers the State of the Union address Thursday, then will campaign in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The former president has nonetheless already vanquished more than a dozen major Republican challengers and now faces only Haley, his former U.N. ambassador. She has maintained strong fundraising and notched her first primary victory over the weekend in Washington, D.C., a Democrat-run city with few registered Republicans. Trump scoffed that Haley had been “crowned queen of the swamp.”
“We can do better than two 80-year-old candidates for president,” Haley said at a rally Monday in the Houston suburbs.
Trump’s victories, however dominating, have shown vulnerabilities with influential voter blocs, especially in college towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, or Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is located, as well as areas with high concentrations of independents. That includes Minnesota, a state Trump did not carry in his otherwise overwhelming Super Tuesday performance in 2016.
Seth De Penning, a self-described conservative-leaning independent, voted Tuesday morning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for Haley, he said, because the GOP “needs a course correction.” De Penning, 40, called his choice a vote of conscience and said he has never voted for Trump because of concerns about his temperament and character.
Still, Haley winning any Super Tuesday contests would take an upset, and a Trump sweep would only intensify pressure on her to leave the race.
Biden has his own problems, including low approval ratings and polls suggesting that many Americans, even a majority of Democrats, don’t want to see the 81-year-old running again. The president’s easy Michigan primary win last week was spoiled slightly by an “uncommitted” campaign organized by activists who disapprove of the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Allies of the “uncommitted” vote are pushing similar protest votes elsewhere, including Minnesota. The state has a significant population of Muslims, including in its Somali American community.
In Massachusetts, 29-year-old Aliza Hoover explained her “no preference” vote as a principled opposition to Biden’s approach to Israel but said it does not necessarily reflect how she will vote in November.
“I think a vote of no preference right now is a statement to make yourself a single-issue voter, and at the moment the fact that my tax dollars are funding a genocide does make me a single-issue voter,” Hoover said.
Biden also is the oldest president ever and Republicans key on any verbal slip he makes. His aides insist that skeptical voters will come around once it is clear that either Trump or Biden will be elected again in November. Trump is now the same age Biden was during the 2020 campaign, and he has exacerbated questions about his own fitness with recent flubs, such as mistakenly suggesting he was running against Barack Obama, who left the White House in 2017.
“I would love to see the next generation move up and take leadership roles,” said Democrat Susan Steele, 71, who voted Tuesday for Biden in Portland, Maine.
Such concerns haven’t moved ardent Trump supporters.
“Trump would eat him up,” Ken Ballos, a retired police officer who attended a weekend Trump rally in Virginia, adding that Biden “would look like a fool up there.”
Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Steve LeBlanc in Boston; David Sharp in Portland, Maine; Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia; Trisha Ahmed in Eden Prairie, Minnesota; and Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.
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A motorcyclist was seriously hurt in a crash with another vehicle on July Fourth in Groton, Massachusetts.
The Groton Fire Department says the collision occurred around 8:34 a.m. Saturday in the area of Old Ayer Road and Boston Road (Route 119).
The motorcyclist, a man in his 40s, suffered a significant lower-body injury. He was taken by ambulance to a landing zone at the fire station on Farmers Row, then flown by a medical helicopter to UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. His condition wasn’t immediately available.
The driver of the passenger vehicle reported no injuries, officials added.
It’s unclear what caused the crash. An investigation by the Groton Police Department is ongoing.
Higher gas prices due to the war in Iran have also increased interest in EVs. And Massachusetts has continued adding charging stations at a rapid pace. Legislators, too, could eventually restore tax breaks and other programs supporting electrification, if Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House.
“It’s more clear than ever that the transition to electric transportation is going to happen regardless of the decisions happening in Washington,” said Daniel Gatti, director of the transportation program at the nonprofit Acadia Center in Maine, pointing to the declining cost of batteries and improving technology around the world. “It’s just a question of the speed of that transition and some of the immediate headwinds that we’re facing.”
The Massachusetts climate plan to reduce fossil fuel emissions included a goal of getting almost 1 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road by 2030, or about one-fifth of all vehicles. But in the first quarter of 2026, the number of electric vehicles registered with the Registry of Motor Vehicles declined slightly from the end of last year to about 167,000, the first dip in four years.
Over the past six months, state drivers have registered fewer than 4,000 battery and battery-hybrid passenger vehicles, compared with more than 17,000 in the prior six months before the federal credit was eliminated. The RMV totals include new and used EVs that drivers register here, while subtracting vehicles taken off the road.
The state may have to adjust the date of its EV target due to the slowdown, Anna Vanderspek, EV program director at the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, said. But the transition is still needed as soon as possible to meet the state’s climate goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in half, she said.
“The goal is based on the science and all the math that [the state] did in writing the clean energy and climate plan,” Vanderspek said. “We need to reduce transportation emissions this much to do that.”
EV sales have slowed nationwide since the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress killed the federal tax credit for EVs at the end of September. That prompted automakers to cancel production or US sales of nearly 20 models and take tens of billions of dollars in losses as they shuttered EV assembly lines.
Despite the setbacks, more affordable EVs will arrive over the next few years and charging stations are proliferating, Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of insights at Cox Automotive, noted in the research firm’s first-quarter report. “Those longer-term fundamentals continue to support EV growth,” she wrote. “The timeline has shifted, but the direction hasn’t.”
In terms of the charging infrastructure, Massachusetts currently has 1,921 EV fast charging ports, according to the US Department of Energy. That’s up 36 percent from 1,408 a year earlier and double the number from two years ago.
Last week, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation christened its latest state-owned charging station behind a McDonald’s at a rest stop in Plymouth off Route 3. The four gleaming orange and white chargers, installed in just three months, can refill a battery at up to 320 kWh, adding about 200 miles of range to some of the latest EVs in 10 minutes.
Dave Depatie, a retired engineer who drives for Uber and Lyft, pulled up in his Hyundai Ioniq 6 sedan as the first customer. With current gas prices, Depatie said he is saving more than $200 a month with his EV, which he bought in January, compared to his prior car, a hybrid gas-powered sedan.
“I’m definitely going electric from now on,” Depatie, who lives on Cape Cod, said. “I haven’t touched the gas pump and had gas on my hands since January.”
With multiple incentives from the state, including one targeted at ride-sharing drivers, and an incentive from Uber, Depatie got $15,500 back in immediate incentive payments/credits for switching to an EV.
MassDOT has struggled at times to add fast chargers. The agency has yet to open any charging stations funded under the five-year-old National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. And improving the relatively slow chargers at rest stops on the Mass. Turnpike has been delayed after the contractor selected to revamp the stops backed out last year.
Still, the agency has other funds it can use, such as its regular capital budget that paid for the site in Plymouth and another opening soon in Barnstable.
“We said, well, let’s go with non-federal aid and just go with state funds for the Barnstable and Plymouth build-out,” Andrew Paul, MassDOT’s director of strategic initiatives and highway design, said.
With the opening of the Plymouth chargers, the state so far has built 12 fast charging stations with a total of 30 ports.
Other state agencies are also funding charging stations. Construction is starting over the summer on six fast charging stations, from Springfield to Brockton, chosen to be convenient for ride-sharing drivers. The state-funded Mass. Clean Energy Center paid for the installations, with four to eight ports each.
“Ride-sharing drivers are just such a valuable target for the state,” Acadia’s Gatti said. “They’re the some of the highest mileage drivers on the road, so you’re getting more bang from your buck in terms of emissions [reductions].”
At the same time, the private sector has been on a massive charging station expansion in the state. Tesla last year opened fast charging stations, now compatible with all EV brands, in Holyoke, Marlborough, Medford, Methuen, Plymouth, Revere, and Worcester. And new charging companies have entered the Massachusetts market, including Ionna, formed by major automakers with an emphasis on adding the same amenities found at gas stations.
The state is planning to add plain blue, square signs with an icon of an EV charger to alert drivers to the new stations in Plymouth and Barnstable.
“All the sites that come online will have something at least as simple as that,” MassDOT’s Paul said. “There could be some more sophisticated ways of communicating to drivers, but working with our traffic engineers who approve signs, it turns out it’s complicated.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
A man was shot and killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, July 4th.
It happened around 4:30 a.m. near Broadway Street and Norfolk Street, according to the Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan. A pedestrian found the man shot in the area around 5:30 a.m. and called 911.
First responders arrived to find that the man had died. He was identified as 32-year-old Xavier Bautista from Cambridge. The City of Cambridge said that Bautista worked in the Public Works Department and was off-duty at the time of the shooting. They described him as a “valued colleague” who was “beloved” by friends and family.
“We extend our deepest condolences to those who knew and loved him. This is a tremendous loss, and our entire City grieves alongside his family, friends, and coworkers,” the city said in a statement. “Gun violence has absolutely no place in our community. We are unwavering in our commitment to keeping Cambridge safe, and we will do everything in our power to support the investigation and ensure accountability.”
No arrests have been made. Cambridge Police, the Middlesex DA’s Office, and Massachusetts State Police are investigating.
“The City will continue to deploy every necessary resource and will fully support our law enforcement partners as they work to determine the circumstances associated with the shooting and to bring justice to those affected,” Cambridge said.
Anyone with information is asked to call Cambridge Police at 617-349-3300 or submit an anonymous tip.
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