Add Category
With both major parties in the United States seemingly settled on who their nominees will be for the 2024 presidential election, it would be easy to assume the primary season is all but over.
In reality, both leading candidates are a long way from reaching the delegate count needed to lock up their parties' nominations, and hundreds of delegates are still up for grabs as states carry out their primaries and caucuses moving forward.
The largest chunk of those delegates will be awarded on Tuesday, when 15 states (and one territory) will hold primaries or caucuses to choose the Democratic and Republican parties' nominees.
While the excitement of the unknown might not be so prominent this year, it's still worth taking a look at the process by which millions of Americans will have their say on who they send to the White House.
Here are which states are voting, what to look for in the results, and how "Super Tuesday" came to be one of the biggest days on the US political calendar.
Which states vote on Super Tuesday?
This Tuesday, voters in 13 states will cast their ballots in presidential primaries — a process much like a regular election, with volunteers running polling stations and counting results.
Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.
Some of those states hold "open" primaries, in which voters can choose which party's primary they wish to participate in, while others restrict participation to voters registered as a member of that particular party.
Also on Tuesday, both parties in Utah will hold their presidential caucuses, in which voters will gather in person to select their nominees, sometimes attempting to convince undecided or wavering supporters to switch sides.
Republicans in Alaska and Democrats in the US territory of American Samoa will hold their caucuses as well, while Democrats will also hear the results of the Iowa mail-in ballot that kicked off their primary season earlier this year.
While voters will be presented with their choice of preferred candidate, they aren't actually directly selecting their nominee.
Instead, as you have probably gathered by now, they are nominating delegates to their party's national conventions, which will take place later this year (the Republicans will hold theirs in July, while the Democrats will follow suit in August).
Those delegates are pledged to their allocated candidate when it comes time to actually cast their vote at their party's convention. However, if a clear winner fails to emerge from that process, they can take part in bartering and deal-making to settle on a nominee.
Each state has a number of delegate spots allocated to it by each party, based largely on its population.
Many of those states award their entire slate of delegate spots to the single candidate that receives the most votes — meaning some states are more valuable than others when it comes to allocating time and campaign resources.
This year, 1,420 of the Democrats' total 3,934 delegates are being awarded on Super Tuesday (about 36 per cent), while the Republicans will award 874 of their 2,429 delegates (also 36 per cent).
Wasn't Trump taken off the ballot in some Super Tuesday states?
Three states — Colorado, Maine and Illinois — had decided that Trump was ineligible to run in their primaries.
That's because the US Constitution prohibits government officials who "engage in insurrection or rebellion" from holding office. The three states found he did just that in his fight to overturn the 2020 election result.
But overnight, the US Supreme Court effectively ruled those states had overstepped the mark, and couldn't kick Trump off their ballots after all.
The nine justices unanimously decided only congress had the power to make such a decision.
Why do so many states vote at once?
As is often the case with US politics, the presidential primary calendar in its current form is the result of historical events, shifting demographics, hard-nosed bargaining and plain old tradition.
Which states vote early, for example, has been a long-running source of conflict, with some states vying to set the agenda by bringing their primaries forward against the wishes of party bosses (New Hampshire Democrats, incidentally, tested the will of their party's national committee this year, and have been told the results of their primary will not count).
Super Tuesday in its modern form has existed since the mid-1980s, and was prompted by former vice-president Walter Mondale's historic loss to president Ronald Reagan in 1984, in which the former movie star and California governor cruised to re-election against the hapless Mondale by 49 states to one.
Following the loss, the Democratic Party moved to put its thumb on the scale of the contest by ensuring southern states would vote together towards the beginning of the primary season, resulting in more than a dozen contests taking place on the same Tuesday (the traditional day for elections in the US).
This, the thinking went, would result in centrist candidates gaining momentum early on and being more likely to become the party's nominee, avoiding blowout defeats in the general election like those handed to liberal northerners Mondale and George McGovern.
The approach didn't pay dividends straight away, with the first early Super Tuesday in 1988 seeing Al Gore and Jesse Jackson split the southern states, and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis going on to win the nomination.
But it did provide a boost during the next cycle for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, who went on to become the first two-term Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt.
The winner of Super Tuesday has since usually gone on to win the party's nomination — the exception being in 2008, when Barack Obama won more states but fewer delegates than Hillary Clinton.
While Super Tuesday is no longer as heavily focused on the south as it once was (just under half of the 15 states up for grabs this Tuesday sit below the Mason-Dixon line, not including western states like California) the existence of a delegate-heavy day towards the beginning of the calendar still serves as a filter for underperforming or poorly funded campaigns.
The raw number of delegates on offer across multiple states favours well-funded campaigns with momentum already on their side, rather than insurgent candidates willing to press the flesh in coffee shops and town halls.
For better or for worse, Super Tuesday is designed to make or break presidential campaigns.
Is Super Tuesday still important this year?
Unusually at this point in a presidential nominating contest, there is not all that much riding on the outcome of this year's Super Tuesday contests.
Both parties appear to have settled on their nominees, with Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump each holding commanding leads in the polls, wins in all the major contests so far, and the benefits of incumbency (or asserted incumbency) when it comes to donors and backing from party establishments.
Biden's primary challengers, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, have failed to make any impact in early states, while Trump's last remaining challenger, his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, has won just one contest (Washington, DC, for a total of 19 delegates, having had her hopes dashed in New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina).
LoadingHaley now appears to be staying in the race on principle alone (or, alternatively, to be the last woman standing should Trump's legal troubles make his candidacy impossible).
It's unlikely anyone not named Trump or Biden will win a single state on Tuesday, let alone wrest enough delegates from the frontrunners to mount a serious challenge moving forward.
However, some dangers still lurk for the leading candidates.
If Biden's support falters even a little — think campaigns like Michigan's high vote for "uncommitted" due to his support for Israel's war in Gaza — it could provide fuel for those publicly concerned with his age and viability as a candidate against a resurgent Trump.
And if Haley can maintain a consistent level of support — even if the delegate gap between her and Trump continues to widen — it could send a message to nervous Republican strategists that her voters won't support him in a general election.
A key date to watch moving forward is March 19, when Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio will hold their presidential primaries.
While there are not quite as many delegates on offer as on Super Tuesday, that's when both Biden and Trump are expected to hit the number of delegates that would see them lock up their nominations and officially become their parties' presumptive nominees.
How do I stay informed?
The first polls will close at 11am Wednesday AEDT, and results will be coming in well into the evening (Australian time).
ABC News will be live blogging the results as they are announced, as well as publishing key takeaways and analysis from our correspondents in Washington.
You can also tune into the ABC News channel, which will be bringing you updates throughout the day, or listen to ABC NewsRadio.