NY TIMES
Donald J. Trump won sweeping victories across the South and in New England on Tuesday, a show of strength in the Republican primary campaign that underscored the breadth of his appeal and helped him begin to amass a wide delegate advantage despite growing resistance to his candidacy among party leaders.
NY TIMES
Voters cemented the front-runner statuses of Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton by handing them sweeping victories on Super Tuesday, the largest voting day of primaries and caucuses for both parties.
Here’s what happened:
• Donald J. Trump rolled over his Republican rivals by winning seven states. He took Virginia, a bellwether state that had been coveted by Senator Marco Rubio. He expanded his reach with evangelicals in the South with victories in Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee. He also won in Massachusetts, where his message resonated with many working-class voters, and in Vermont.
• But Senator Ted Cruz held off Mr. Trump to win Texas, his home state. A loss for Mr. Cruz here would’ve been a devastating blow to his presidential ambitions. Mr. Cruz saw his second victory of the night in Oklahoma, and his third in Alaska.
• Late in the voting, Mr. Rubio scored his first victory, winning the Republican primary in Minnesota. He urged Republicans not to give up hope of thwarting Mr. Trump.“I will campaign as long as it takes,” he said in Miami.
• Hillary Clinton also swept to victory in seven Democratic state primaries, Her victories, some by big margins, put pressure on her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, to show he could win outside the Northeast.
• Mr. Sanders saw victory in four states. In addition to wins in Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota, he triumphed over Mrs. Clinton in his home state, Vermont. This was one contest he could not afford to lose. In a speech after his victory, he told supporters, “This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about making a political revolution.”
• Mrs. Clinton jubilantly greeted supporters in Florida after her wins with“What a super Tuesday.” In a clear dig at Mr. Trump’s campaign mantra, she said: “America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole.” She added, “Instead of building walls, we’re going to break down barriers.”
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| Doug Mills, NY Times |
NY TIMES
Based on results from Democratic primaries and caucuses in 11 states, Mrs. Clinton succeeded in overpowering him in predominantly black and Hispanic areas that were rich in delegates needed for the Democratic nomination.
Mrs. Clinton, who also won Massachusetts and showed notable strength among Southern white voters, came away with a strong delegate lead over Mr. Sanders — notably larger than the one that Barack Obama had over her at this point in the 2008 presidential race.
NY TIMES
Even as he rolled up commanding victories in seven states on Tuesday, Mr. Trump confronted a loud and persistent refusal to rally around him as leading figures in his own party denounced his slow disavowal of white supremacists, elected officials boldly discouraged constituents from backing him, and lifelong Republicans declared that they would boycott the election if he is their nominee.
Not since the rupture of 1964, when conservatives seized power from their moderate rivals and nominated Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, has a major party faced such a crisis of identity.
“History is repeating itself,” said the historian Richard Norton Smith. “The party changed then as permanently and profoundly as can be in politics, effectively becoming two parties.”
Even as Mr. Trump’s performance Tuesday illustrated his strength, Senator Ted Cruz’s success in Texas and Oklahoma underscored the broader Republican dilemma: There is no consensus among Republicans about who could be Mr. Trump’s most formidable opponent, and there is probably not enough time for one to emerge.
The cultural and ideological fissures opening in the party could take a generation to patch, according to Republican leaders, historians and strategists — and many are convinced that Mr. Trump will guarantee Democrats another four years in the White House.
Democrats are now poised to exploit a fortuitous intersection of forces: an improving economy with low unemployment; a Democratic president with a nearly 50 percent approval rating; a Supreme Court battle in which Republicans are energizing liberal voters with vows of obstruction; and now, what is likely to be a relatively smooth nomination process that will give Mrs. Clinton a chance to bring together the party’s disparate strands.
Of course, Mrs. Clinton, should she prevail in the primary campaign, has plenty of repair work left to do: wooing the thousands of liberal supporters whose feelings of alienation with the Democratic establishment drew them to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She began that effort on Tuesday night, in a victory speech that focused heavily on the Sanders campaign theme of economic justice. And there is little indication, so far, that these voters will spurn Mrs. Clinton for a Republican.
And Mrs. Clinton needs to navigate a series of potentially damning investigations into her use of a private email server that have raised enduring questions about her judgment and management. Those inquiries have introduced a level of unpredictability that her campaign can do little to control.
With every nasty turn of the Republican nominating contest, Mrs. Clinton’s position seems to strengthen. Day by day, the anti-Trump forces are marshaling, vowing to drag the primary process out until the convention in July.
Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico would not commit to supporting him if he won the nomination.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee four years ago, took the unusual step of scolding the Republican front-runner from the halls of the Capitol building for failing to reject the support of David Duke. “If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Mr. Ryan said, “there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
In a discussion with little modern precedent, several high-profile Republicans are expressing uncertainty about how aggressively they would support Mr. Trump as the nominee, suggesting they might need to lose the campaign to save the party.
But any move to deny Mr. Trump the nomination risks further provoking the angry movement that he has ignited.
Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. “It is going to be really ugly,” she said.
For now, the revulsion for Mr. Trump could produce a nightmare scenario for Republicans on Election Day: abandonment by rank-and-file voters who, like a growing number of party leaders, cannot stomach the concept of the mogul as their standard-bearer.