Good morning! On this day in 1865, Vice President Andrew Johnson gave his inaugural address… while mind-numbingly blasted on whiskey. He was so smashed he couldn’t even properly swear in new senators. Just 42 days later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Johnson became president.

2024

⭐Super Tuesday has finally arrived

Super Bowl. Super Mario. Super Tuesday. All equally famous icons of pop culture. No? Just us? Okay then. Tomorrow marks the single most stacked day in the presidential nominating calendar for both parties. That’s why it’s Super. And tomorrow, get this, is a Tuesday. Wild stuff.

Who’s voting? More than one-third of both Democratic and Republican convention delegates will be awarded tomorrow. And those delegates are the real prize — they’re the ones actually voting for the nominees at the party conventions this summer.

Each state sets the date of its primary. Here's what the map looks like tomorrow:

Democrats will vote in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and American Samoa.

Republicans will vote in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.

By tomorrow evening, expect Joe Biden and Donald Trump to be super close to officially sewing up their respective nominations. Once they’ve won more than 50% of total delegates, they’re each considered the “presumptive nominee.”

Nikki Haley is still challenging Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. But she’s down bad. And yesterday cracked the door to not supporting Trump in the general election if (let’s be honest: when) he wins the nomination.

There are loads of non-presidential primaries tomorrow. Here’s a quick overview of the most dramatic:

• California - U.S. Senate: Three Democratic members of the House are running against each other. California uses a weird unique system where the primary has candidates from all parties. Only the top two finishers make it to the general election. This is California, so the leading Democrat hopes that’s him and the Republican. The other Democrats have to hope they can eke out a second-place finish to make the general election a D-on-D race.

• California - U.S. House: California has 52 House seats yu probably don’t care about. But we’ll point out that “Boy Meets World” star Ben Savage is running in one of them (covering Hollywood, of course). He’s probably going to lose, though — his fundraising is poor.

• Texas - Republican Civil War: Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are targeting members of their own party in tomorrow’s state legislative primaries. Abbott’s hitting them for not supporting his education agenda. Paxton’s hitting them for trying to impeach him last year. In many cases, they're supporting different candidates in the same race. So the state legislative contests are seen as a proxy war between Abbott and Paxton.

POLITICS

🔴 Three states and Washington, D.C. held Republican presidential contests over the weekend. Nikki Haley won her first primary with a landslide victory. The problem for her is it was Washington, D.C.’s. She may have preferred to lose that one. Donald Trump swept Idaho, Michigan, and Missouri. The real prize here is convention delegates and Trump’s up to 244. Haley has 43.

⚪ The Supreme Court updated its website yesterday saying it “may announce opinions" today. It never discloses in advance which opinions those might be. But it’s reasonable to assume the justices will decide whether Trump is eligible for tomorrow’s Colorado presidential primary. He’ll appear on the ballots regardless — they’ve already been printed. But if the court decides against him, votes for him likely won’t count.

🔵 First Lady Dr. Jill Biden is on a campaign swing through Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. She praised her husband for placing “women at the center of his agenda.” And she hit Trump for “a lifetime” of devaluing women. Expect the Biden camp to ratchet up the first lady’s appearances as the campaign heats up.

🔴 Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), who endorsed Nikki Haley for president last week, said she cannot vote for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. She also admitted she didn’t vote for Trump in 2020. Murkowski was appointed to the Senate in 2002 by the governor of Alaska… who happened to be her father, Frank Murkowski. He was later defeated for reelection by none other than Sarah Palin.

🔴 Two Republican senators — Markwayne Mullin (OK) and Mike Rounds (SD) — cautioned former President Donald Trump against getting involved in the Republican Senate leadership contest. After the November elections, they’ll choose a replacement for Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has led Senate Republicans since 2007.

TRIVIA

One of the last living world leaders from the Cold War era, 1980s Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, died last week. But, because time is weird, there is still one surviving head of state from World War 2. What’s his name? What was his title? And what country did he lead?

WORLD

🇭🇹 Haiti: Armed gangs stormed Haiti's largest prison and released thousands of inmates. Haiti's government is rapidly falling apart as gang violence takes over. Kenya, Bangladesh, Barbados, and others have pledged to send troops to stabilize the country.

🇮🇷 Iran: Iranians voted in parliamentary elections over the weekend that were boycotted by the opposition for being “meaningless.” They also chose the Assembly of Experts that will select Iran's next supreme leader. Every candidate was pre-approved by the ruling government. Even a recent former president of Iran was forbidden from running. Turnout was, unsurprisingly, low.

🇮🇱 Israel: Israel agreed to a six-week ceasefire framework as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins next week. Hamas met with international negotiators in Cairo yesterday on that but no deal has yet been made. Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is angry with his cabinet official Benny Gantz for a rogue meeting with U.S. officials in Washington today. At the same time, the U.S. is now airdropping food into Gaza.

🇺🇸 United States: Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday honored the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. She joined Attorney General Merrick Garland and others in walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights protestors were beaten by police in 1965.

BRIEFS

• Shoot your shot: the attorneys who won a case to void $56 billion in Tesla compensation to Elon Musk want legal fees of $6 billion

• Belarusian activists ran an AI candidate in recent elections because you can’t imprison a computer

• Amid soaring overdose deaths, Oregon is moving to recriminalize some drugs after decriminalizing them in 2020

• OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk is suing the company and CEO Sam Altman for violating its "open" mission

• Some 170 people were executed by militants in the West African nation of Burkina Faso

• Georgia’s legislature wants local police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally in the wake of Laken Riley's murder

• LeBron James just became the first NBA player ever to score 40,000 career points in the regular season

• President Biden signed an executive order to help prevent Americans’ data from being exported to "countries of concern"

• Switzerland voted to give retirees a 13th pension check each year but voted against raising the retirement age

QUOTE

SNACKS

🗯️ Fight: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, 76, squared up ready to fight a young climate protestor at Harvard before his enforcer stepped up and physically threw the guy out of the room.

🚀 Space: Future astronauts heading to Mars will need to spend 18 months in a tiny spaceship plus probably a year in cramped quarters on the planet. What personality trait does NASA research consider a must-have for such a grueling trip? A good sense of humor.

🌺 Corpse flower: Spring is in the air. And, at a museum in California, so is the fresh springy smell of “rotting flesh.” The corpse flower blooms only every three to five years and lasts only a few days. Considering it smells like death, that’s probably a good thing.

ANSWER

From 1943 to 1946, Simeon II ruled as Tsar of Bulgaria. He was exiled in 1946 when the monarchy was abolished. Though head of state, he was just a kid during his reign. He was allowed to come home in the 1990s and was later elected prime minister.

If you answered the Dalai Lama of Tibet, we’ll give it to you, but Tibet was only semi-independent at the time. It never achieved full independence before being swallowed up by China in the 1950s. But the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has been Tibet’s legal ruler since 1940 (aged 4).