This post contains video and analysis from USA Today (on the USA Today page). In addition, we have included a video analysis from Bloomberg TV (below).
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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump entered Super Tuesday and its dozen contests as their parties’ front-runners. Now that the dust has settled, has that changed?
Not at all.
Here are our top takeaways from Super Tuesday:
The Republican establishment is not ready to embrace him. His top challengers, by all appearances, remain determined to stop him and are getting increasingly personal and aggressive in their tactics. And the primary calendar, with its delegate-rich, winner-take-all contests in states like Florida and Ohio, still provides a way for someone to overtake him. But despite all that, you would be hard-pressed to sketch out a scenario now where Donald J. Trump is not the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.
Why? There’s the breadth of his victories Tuesday night, from a dominant win in Massachusetts to victories across the Deep South. There’s the fact that instead of having just one determined rival, he still has at least two in Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, to say nothing of John Kasich and Ben Carson, who continue to pick up votes, making it possible for the New York billionaire to win contests decisively with his existing base of support. And those Trump supporters, if we’ve learned anything in this campaign, aren’t going anywhere, no matter what.
Clinton entered the 2016 presidential race as a prohibitive front-runner to become the Democratic nominee. Then, unexpectedly, Bernie Sanders emerged as not only as viable alternative but a threat to win many of the early states — a belief he validated by losing Iowa by the narrowest of margins, then taking New Hampshire in a landslide. But even before the first votes were cast, it was long believed, no matter what, that the March 1 slate of contests, mostly in the South with large African-American electorates, would shore up Clinton’s candidacy and stem whatever momentum Sanders may have acquired.
And they did. She won in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, by 2-1 margins in many of those states. In addition, she picked up a victory in Massachusetts, Sanders’ backyard. All told, she build up a healthy lead in pledged delegates to go along with an already enormous edge in superdelegates. The math for Sanders has always been unkind. Super Tuesday made it worse.
The Bloomberg report:
