TEMPE, Arizona — As Joe Biden and Donald Trump moved closer to a November rematch, primary voters around the country on Tuesday urged their favored candidate to keep up the fight and worried about what might happen if their side loses this fall.
There was little suspense about Tuesday's results as both candidates are already their parties' presumptive nominees. Trump easily won Republican primaries in Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio. Biden did the same except in Florida, where Democrats canceled their primary and opted to award all 224 of their delegates to Biden.
The primaries and key down-ballot races became a reflection of the national political mood. With many Americans unenthusiastic about 2024's choice for the White House, both Biden and Trump's campaigns are working to fire up their bases by tearing into each other and warning of the perils of the opponent.
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Voters Tuesday seemed to hear that.
Pat Shackleford, an 84-year-old caregiver in Mesa, Arizona, said she voted for Trump in Arizona's primary to send the former president a message.
"I wanted to encourage him that the fight has been worthwhile, that more of us are behind him than maybe the media tells you," Shackleford said.
Jamie and Cassandra Neal, sisters who both live in Phoenix, said they were unenthusiastic Biden supporters until they saw the vigor the president brought to his State of the Union speech. It fired them up for the coming election.
"Beforehand it was like, 'Well, he's the only decent one there,'" said Cassandra Neal, 42. "After his address it was like, 'OK, let's do it!'"
Jamie Neal, 45, said Biden had been "way too nice" before and needed to match Trump, whom she described as "vicious."
"Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire," she said.
In Ohio's Republican Senate primary, Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno defeated two challengers, Ohio Secretary of State Frank Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.
In the final days of the campaign, The Associated Press reported on Thursday that in 2008, someone with access to Moreno's work email account created a profile on an adult website. The AP could not definitively confirm it was created by Moreno himself. Moreno's lawyer said a former intern created the account and provided a statement from the intern, Dan Ricci, who said he created the account as "part of a juvenile prank."
Questions about the profile sparked frustration among senior Republican operatives about Moreno's potential vulnerability in a general election, according to seven people familiar with conversations about how to address the matter, who requested anonymity.
Trump and Biden for weeks focused on the general election, aiming their campaigns on states that could be competitive in November rather than merely those holding primaries.
Trump, a Florida voter, cast his ballot Tuesday at a recreation center in Palm Beach and told reporters, "I voted for Donald Trump."
Trump and Biden are running on their records in office and casting the other as a threat to America. Trump, 77, portrays the 81-year-old Biden as mentally unfit. The president described his Republican rival as a threat to democracy after his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and his praise of foreign strongmen.
"President Biden, I don't think he knows how to tie his shoes anymore," said Trump supporter Linda Bennet, a resident of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, not far from the former president's Mar-a-Lago resort.
Even as she echoed Trump's arguments about Biden, she criticized Trump's rhetoric and "the way he composes himself" as "not presidential at all." But she said the former president is "a man of his word" and the country, especially the economy, felt stronger to her under Trump's leadership.
In Columbus, Ohio, Democrat Brenda Woodfolk voted for Biden and shared the president's framing of the choice this fall.
"It's scary," she said of the prospect that Trump could be in the Oval Office again. "Trump wants to be a dictator," she said.
Bennet and Woodfolk agreed that immigration in one of their top concerns, though they offered different takes on why.
"This border thing is out of control," Bennet said. "I think it's the government's plot or plan to bring these people in to change the whole dynamic for their benefit, so I'm pretty peeved."
Woodfolk said she doesn't mind immigrants "sharing" opportunities in the U.S. but worried it comes at the expense of "people who've been here all their lives."
Trump and Republicans hammered Biden on the influx of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, seeking to capitalize on the issue. Biden ratcheted up a counteroffensive in recent weeks after Senate Republicans killed a migration compromise they negotiated with the White House, withholding their support only after Trump said he opposed the deal. Biden used the circumstances to argue that Trump and Republicans have no interest in solving the issue.
For the last year, Trump coupled his campaign with his legal challenges, including dozens of criminal counts and civil cases in which he faces more than $500 million in fines.