Republican Donald Trump will take at least five states as he heads toward a commanding Super Tuesday showing that will give him a firmer grip on the party’s presidential nomination that will become increasingly difficult for his rivals to break.
Republican Donald Trump will take at least five states as he heads toward a commanding Super Tuesday showing that will give him a firmer grip on the party’s presidential nomination that will become increasingly difficult for his rivals to break.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas denied Trump a Super Tuesday sweep, winning his home state and neighboring Oklahoma, according to multiple networks. The wins are likely to keep Cruz’s presidential bid alive at least through the next big slate of contests on March 15.
The real estate mogul and former reality television star won in Virginia, a state where Senator Marco Rubio aggressively campaigned and was thought to have one of his better chances of pulling off his first state win. Rubio still has yet to win a single contest.
Besides Virginia, Trump is also projected to win Georgia, Alabama, Massachusetts and Tennessee.
In Vermont, the race is too close to call between Trump and Ohio Governor John Kasich, CBS News and NBC News said.
The Super Tuesday outcome across 11 states will represent the closest thing yet to a national referendum on Trump, the brash New York billionaire who has thrown out the traditional rules of campaigning. It will also provide a look at whether a tag-team assault by his two top rivals, Rubio and Cruz, has tarnished his appeal.
In all of the states, the raw vote totals will be telling, but more important are the delegates awarded under varying rules in the states. Other states being contested by Republicans on Tuesday include Alaska, Arkansas and Minnesota.
In Texas, preliminary exit polling data posted by ABC News showed two-thirds of Republican voters said they’d be satisfied with Cruz as the nominee, compared with nearly six in 10 for Rubio and less than half for Trump.
State officials reported strong turnout as the biggest day yet in the 2016 campaign drew to a close and a divisive Republican Party battle continued to simmer over the front- runner and future of the party.
Compared to primaries in the last two presidential campaigns, higher turnout appeared to be more the rule than the exception. In Minnesota, Republican leaders told local volunteers to prepare for twice as many caucus-goers as the roughly 65,000 seen in 2008. In Georgia, more than 417,000 ballots were cast early, breaking the 2008 record of about 271,000 early votes, according to the secretary of state. Republicans cast about 100,000 more of those early ballots than Democrats.
Trump entered the day with all the momentum and a string of three dominant victories behind him, in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. He continues to benefit from a splintering of support for his rivals, along with leaders of the party establishment.
The real-estate mogul is leading in the polls virtually everywhere on Super Tuesday except Texas — a critical test for Cruz, who was trying to avoid an embarrassing and potentially campaign-ending loss in his home state. Cruz and Rubio ratcheted up their personal and professional attacks on the front-runner in recent days as their party struggled to agree on whether and how to stop him.
The situation has left some establishment Republicans openly questioning whether their fractured party is headed for disaster in November, should Trump win the nomination. A poll released Tuesday by CNN showed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton beating Trump 52 percent to 44 percent among registered voters in a hypothetical general-election contest. Against Rubio and Cruz, she narrowly trailed.
