Tonight will be the (unofficial) end of the presidential primary season. If everything goes as expected (and it will), both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will secure the necessary majorities of delegates to their respective parties' national conventions, and will thus start to be described in the media as "the designated nominee" (or other similar words which convey both the unofficial nature of the milestone as well as the de facto end to the primary races). Neither man will officially become their parties' nominees until the conventions themselves, but nothing that happens between tonight and then is going to matter -- they'll already both have won.

There are primaries happening today for both major political parties in Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington. Republicans in Hawai'i and Democrats in the Northern Mariana Islands will also be voting. The combination of delegates up for grabs is more than both candidates need to cross the threshold of having won a majority of convention delegates, which will make this the real end of the road for primary season.

Of course, this was the likely result long before any state had even voted. Both Biden and Trump had pretty effectively cleared the field of serious challengers early on. This isn't all that unusual, seeing as how Biden is an incumbent president running for a second term and Trump is a former president also seeking a second (non-consecutive) term. The weight of incumbency (or "recent incumbency," for Trump) is generally enough to win the primary race and that's exactly how it turned out this time around on both sides.

Trump was challenged by quite a number of other Republican candidates, but none of them posed any real danger to him. Ron DeSantis was touted as the one who just might be able to dethrone Trump, but then he started to actually campaign and the voters figured out what an annoying little twerp he truly is. His poll numbers went into decline and never recovered in the slightest. Other GOP candidates fought tooth and nail to quicken the slide DeSantis was on, but none of them emerged as a viable alternative (either to DeSantis or to Trump). Nikki Haley was the only one to see any kind of polling bounce (after her notable debate performances), but it was far too little and far too late. She stuck around longer than all the rest, which was largely a function of her being backed by heavyweight GOP donors to the very end. Throughout it all -- right up to when DeSantis bowed out of the race -- almost all the not-Trump candidates spent the lion's share of their time and energy attacking each other and ignoring the clear frontrunner in the race. The only exceptions to this were the two candidates who openly ran as being against Trump -- Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson. Neither one even made it to New Hampshire, though. The GOP race was pretty much over before even Iowa voted. Tonight what was evident to all for many months beforehand is just going to be confirmed: Donald Trump was always going to be the GOP nominee.

Over on the Democratic side, the primaries haven't really been a true test of Biden's support, since the only candidate who could have even made it into double digits in any Democratic primary decided to drop out and run as an independent. So Robert F. Kennedy Junior will face Biden in the general election instead of the Democratic primaries, where he could indeed be a spoiler for Biden's chances. Cornel West, a lefty icon, also decided to run on a third-party ticket rather than directly take on Biden in the primaries. This left only two Democratic candidates for Biden to beat: a self-funded gadfly (Dean Phillips) and a self-help guru (Marianne Williamson). Neither had the slightest chance of defeating Biden, which will only be confirmed again tonight.

It is (checks calendar) still before the ides of March. This is, in a normal year, incredibly early for primary season to be totally over. In most election years at least one of the two parties' races is an open one, meaning that one candidate isn't all that likely to wrap everything up quite so early in the calendar. Usually at this point there's still a real horserace to secure delegates, meaning each state's outcome still matters to each candidates' totals, so they'd all still be out there campaigning their hearts out. Not so this year -- Haley made it past Super Tuesday and then immediately threw in the towel. Both candidates are essentially running unopposed now. Which, as I said, is unusual.

This is all a function of Donald Trump's almost-complete hostile takeover of the Republican Party. His GOP voting base is so rock-solid in their support for him that he never really had to worry about the outcome at all. There are indeed some Republicans who are not big fans of the MAGA movement and Trump, but almost all of them have either quit the party in disgust, quit politics in exasperation (of losing a primary to a Trump-supported challenger), or been forced out by Trump turning his guns on them. The party purge is almost complete, at this point. Other than the frenzied MAGA base, there is really nowhere for GOP voters disaffected with Trump (for whatever reason) to go.

Democrats, to be fair, aren't exactly wildly enthused about their own candidate either. Biden is already the oldest U.S. president ever, and plenty of people question the wisdom of giving him four more years in office. But he avoided any major challenge to his re-election, although in his case (as opposed to Trump's) this was mostly through deference to a sitting president rather than fear of blowback from the party's voting base.

Also, this year a unique third-party campaign was launched, in a rather "let's put the cart before the horse" fashion. No Labels decided to get on the ballot in as many states as possible without first naming a candidate. This provides a ready-to-go independent campaign for whomever they eventually settle on. They're only on the ballots in 16 states (last time I checked), but that is an enormous step up from what newly-formed third-parties or independent candidates usually face -- just ask R.F.K. Jr., he'll tell you. This cart-before-the-horse effort has never happened before, so it is yet another unique circumstance to the entire 2024 election season.

So while it has indeed been a rather boring primary season (one indication of this is how low-key the end of it all will be tonight -- I doubt there'll be special news programs on broadcast television breathlessly awaiting the election returns), the general election is going to be much more of a free-for-all than usual. At some point tonight, it will become confirmed -- America is going to face a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But hardly anyone's going to be paying attention, because as I said this has been more than obvious for months now. The end of the 2024 primary season will be about as anticlimactic as any event in a presidential race that I can recall, personally. It will end not with a bang, not with a whimper even, but rather with a huge yawn.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant