America's presidential race has captured the world's curiosity like few others before. As the candidates struggle to speak over each other on stage, hundreds of millions of people follow on TV and online across the globe.

The unprecedented media extravaganza surrounding the primary race has spread far and wide. Now an international audience that once viewed the candidacy of celebrity Donald Trump as a joke is growing bewildered by his success, and concerned as a potentially successful Super Tuesday showing seems poised to firmly cement his frontrunner status.

News readers in New Zealand get daily coverage of the U.S. election, said Patrick Gower, political editor at his country's largest private TV broadcaster, Newshub, in Houston on Sunday to cover the race.

"New Zealanders can't look away. It's become like a nightly entertainment show, and it's become kind of scary," he said. "People are wondering if they're seeing the start of destabilization of the U.S."

His bosses made the unusual decision to send him halfway around the world to cover a primary race, he said, because they wondered if Trump's political ascent could mean global consequences. So he joined news crews from about a dozen countries at Houston's GOP debate, to help home audiences understand what's going on.

At a Houston campaign rally for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Japan Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Hirohito Nezu said, "The U.S. election is very impactful in every country, including Japan. Many Japanese people are especially interested to know about why Mr. Trump has such momentum in this election."

Foreign journalists surveyed unanimously called Trump their audiences' key interest in the race. No surprise - he also stole the show in U.S. media with his celebrity demeanor, bold but unsubstantiated claims and brash insults of opponents.

"These are not normal campaign tactics," said Jerry Polinard, a veteran political scientist at the University of Texas Pan-American, who's followed presidential elections since 1960. "Referring to the physical characteristics of your opponent and not policy issues."

As for the international spotlight, Polinard credited technology more than Trump's antics - technology that lets soundbites and videos travel instantly around the world. And he noted that the loosening of campaign finance laws in the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling helped flood this race with big money to maintain long energetic campaigns that would otherwise have dropped out months ago, keeping American news saturated with election coverage.

All together it has created a high-stakes media spectacle that has permeated borders. The world's largest news organizations, like Britain's BBC, have the U.S. election as a fixture of daily coverage. The candidates pop up on Chinese state TV news several times weekly, said Rick Dunham, a former political reporter now teaching at China's Tsinghua University, and Chinese news programs bring on U.S. experts to analyze the news.

Even in Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian mountain country, people watch the race unfold on social media and TV.

"Even I was getting a little irritated" at seeing the candidates so much, said Arslan Isakov, a marketing professional in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. "But what can I do if they are media stars?"

By 3 p.m. Tuesday Norwegian political columnist Frithjof Jacobsen said his news publication, VG, had published three articles on the U.S. election that day, and estimated that 20 to 50 are published daily in all Norwegian media. Kolapo Olapoju, editor of Nigerian news website YNaija.com, said Nigerians were "very interested" in this U.S. election and discussed it widely on Twitter, and interpreted Trump's popularity as an indication of a "decadence in morality" in some Americans.

José Roberto de Toledo, a political columnist at O Estado de S. Paolo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, also said his audience followed the election daily since the start of 2016. He searched and found about 140 mentions of Trump's name in his newspaper through February up from 25 in January.

"The idea of what could possibly happen with a former reality TV star as the leader of the free world is something that could affect Canadians," said Ty Pilson, assistant managing editor at Alberta's Calgary Sun newspaper, which dedicates a full page to the U.S. election about four times a week.

Sources widely said that they and their audiences would struggle to explain Trump's success among American voters. He style differs fundamentally from traditional American statesmen, sources observed, and his frequent use of petty insults is uncommon among the world's highest diplomatic circles, which the U.S. president would join.

Trump kicked off his campaign with a speech characterizing the U.S.'s southern neighbor as a hotbed for rapists and drug dealers then promising to build a "giant wall" between the two nations.

Mexican people will be worried if Trump gets the Republican nomination, said Orlando Samaniego, news editor at Mexican newspaper El Debate de Mazatlán.

"Donald Trump represents a lot of the things that the people [in Mazatlán] don't like from the U.S., extreme nationalism, racism ... " Samaniego said. "What Mexicans see is that Trump's thinking unfortunately represents a huge percentage of the American population."

At a folk festival in his city, Samaniego said, revelers traditionally burn an effigy of a problem from the past year. This year the final vote was down to a disease-spreading mosquito and Trump. They picked Trump.

Gower from New Zealand said his aim in Texas was to help his audience understand why so many American voters support Trump. He'll report home that underlying anger at the political establishment, rooted in the pains of a struggling economy, is driving Americans to support Trump's promise of a total overhaul.

But he's also here to answer what Trump could mean for the world. On that front, he had a crown jewel to beam home Thursday: a brief question he landed with Trump and recorded after Thursday's debate.

"What would a Donald Trump presidency mean for a country like New Zealand?" Gower asks in a video uploaded to Twitter and broadcast on TV in New Zealand.

"Say hello to Bob Charles," the presidential candidate replied. "I love Bob Charles."

Bob Charles is a golfer from New Zealand.