Super Tuesday, a day that can revive or destroy a candidate’s hope for the presidency, took place on March 1 across America as eleven states voted in both the republican and democratic races.
Relatively early on, results showed that the Trump political juggernaut is continuing its unstoppable assault on the White House with wins in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Virginia and Vermont; in some of those states he won by as much as 16 percent to 30 percent. Other notable wins in the republican race belonged to Ted Cruz, who convincingly, and rather predictably, won his home state of Texas (by 17 percent) and also won Oklahoma (by 6 percent), with Marco Rubio only winning Minnesota, by a margin of 9 percent.
In the democratic race, Hillary Clinton swept to victory in the southern states on the day, triumphing in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas as well as the eastern state of Virginia. Clinton’s Super Tuesday wins come after a resounding win in the South Carolina primary, in which she trounced Sanders by almost 50 percent. The wins all but secures her nomination, and leaves Sanders, who won his home state of Vermont along with Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma, with little more than a glimmer of hope remaining in his sinking campaign.
Sanders did win four states, including his home state of Vermont, but he now faces an almost impossible struggle as the momentum he gathered in the early state primaries slips further and further away. The reason that Clinton is all but nailed in as the democratic nominee is her convincing triumph in the African-American vote, raking in almost seven out of every 10 African-American votes across all voting states on Super Tuesday, whilst in Alabama she received 92 percent of the African-American vote. Bernie Sanders had to appeal to the minority voters (African-Americans and Hispanics) and the female vote in order to challenge Clinton, and his efforts failed miserably.
Trump’s successes have dwarfed any optimism left in the remaining republican candidates, even if there was a reason for them to be optimistic in the face of looming defeat. Establishment candidate Marco Rubio, who was said to be the main benefactor of the votes left by the once favourite, Jeb Bush, won just one solitary state on Super Tuesday, effectively ending any hope of even challenging, yet alone succeeding, in the republican nomination. According to political analysts, he must now win by an average of 50 percent in the remaining states to stand a chance of gathering the delegates needed to be the nominee to challenge for the presidency.
Ted Cruz, who is the last remaining republican candidate left with the ability to derail the Trump campaign, won a respectable three states and recorded his highest campaign funding for any month (USD $12 million) thus far. The reason for this surge in funding could be that the Republican Party is rallying around a less divisive candidate in Cruz, as opposed to Trump. Lindsay Graham, Senator for South Carolina and another former candidate, said that “we [Republican Party] may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz”, reported the Guardian.
Cruz called for other Republican candidates to drop out to prevent the overall vote being split among too many people, which many see as a key reason why Trump is gathering such a huge proportion of the vote so far.
Republican Ben Carson, who has lead a less than successful campaign despite spending an enormous USD $53.7 million (more than any other candidate), has all but suspended his campaign after only receiving more than 10 percent of the vote in one state on Super Tuesday: Alabama. In an official statement to his supporters, Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, said “I do not see a political path forward” and that he will not be attending the Fox News GOP Presidential Debate on Thursday night. Cruz and Rubio will desperately vie to win his 5 percent-10 percent of the vote in the upcoming states to boost their flailing campaigns.
On March 5 three states will vote in the democratic race, notably Kansas, Louisiana and Nebraska, with Maine on March 6 and Michigan and Mississippi voting on March 8. The republicans go to the polls on again on the same day, with Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine voting on March 5, Puerto Rico on March 6, and Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi on March 8. At least we now know that something extraordinary will have to happen in order to prevent Hillary Clinton coming up against Donald Trump by the end of the primary and caucuses on June 14.