Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton took big steps toward securing their parties’ presidential nominations on Tuesday with a series of state-by-state victories, but their rivals vowed to keep on fighting.
On Super Tuesday, the 2016 campaign’s biggest day of state-by-state nominating contests, Trump and Clinton proved themselves the undisputed front-runners to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.
Now they are under pressure to show they can unify voters in their respective parties before the November 8 election and, in Trump’s case, avoid a potentially disastrous split in the Republican ranks.
US networks projected Trump won seven states, with victories stretching into the Deep South and as far north as Massachusetts, adding to a sense of momentum he had built last month by winning three of the first four contests.
Clinton’s victories in seven states were just as impressive but in many ways predictable, propelled by African-American voters in southern states. Clinton rival Bernie Sanders, a US senator from Vermont, also won his home state along with Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma but lost to her in Massachusetts, which he had hoped to win. The democratic socialist vowed to pursue the battle for the nomination in the 35 states yet to vote.
Trump’s main rivals, US senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, said they were determined to remain in the race. Cruz won Texas and neighbouring Oklahoma, as well as the Alaska caucuses, bolstering his argument that he had the best chance of stopping the New York billionaire. Rubio, the Republican establishment’s favorite, was projected the winner in Minnesota, his first victory in the party’s nominating contests.
Trump waves off GOP criticism
At a news conference in a chandeliered ballroom at his seaside Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump, who has never held public office, dismissed furious criticism aimed at him by establishment Republicans.
Faced with a party in turmoil over his ideas to build a wall between the US and Mexico, deport 11m illegal immigrants and bar Muslims from entering the country, Trump declared he had expanded the party by drawing in disaffected blue-collar Democrats who like his tough-on-trade rhetoric.
The country’s top two elected Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, had chastised Trump over his delayed disavowal of an endorsement by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group.
Clinton, who still faces a well-funded Sanders despite having taken control of the Democratic race, was eager to assail Trump as a way of getting her party’s voters used to the idea of her as the nominee.
“The stakes in this election have never been higher, and the rhetoric we’re hearing on the other side has never been lower,” Clinton told supporters in Miami. “Trying to divide America between us and them is wrong, and we’re not going to let it work.”