HOUSTON—CNN had an announcement. Donald Trump had won Alabama, one of America’s most conservative states. And Donald Trump had won Massachusetts, one of America’s most liberal states.

He’s winning everywhere. Trump obliterated his rivals around the country on 11-state “Super Tuesday,” demonstrating a broad national appeal among Republicans seeking radical change. He is now likely one good day away from winning the nomination of a party whose elites generally see him as odious, unelectable or both.

And his opposition remains deeply fractured. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, falling far short of expectations he had set for himself, won only two of the first 10 states to report results. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won only one.

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Cruz urged his rivals to drop out and consolidate behind him, but they are unlikely to do so. Trump will likely benefit from a divided field through the Florida and Ohio primaries of March 15, which may well be the last chance to stop him.

There were more signs of the intraparty tension that has many Republican observers predicting a historic schism. Trump has divided the party into three camps: enthusiastic backers, critics who will say they will never cast a vote for him even against the reviled Hillary Clinton, and wary fence-sitters attempting to simultaneously save their careers and prevent the party from imploding.







The official party statement on the Super Tuesday results didn’t even mention Trump’s name. The governor of New Mexico refused to commit to supporting him if he were the nominee. Trump, in a typically unusual post-victory appearance at his opulent private club in Florida, threatened Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan while also proclaiming himself a unifier.

Trump, though, also appeared to be trying to position himself for the general election. Speaking more softly than usual, he praised Cruz for his hard work winning Texas, praised the work of Planned Parenthood at length, and previewed his line of attack against Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.

"She's been there for so long,” he said, framed presidentially by a wall of flags. “If she hasn't straightened it out by now, she's not going to straighten it out in the next four years.” He added: “Politicians are all talk, no action.”

The Democratic race, once nearly as dramatic as the Republican race, has now become predictable. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton earned a stranglehold on the party nomination, winning fewer Super Tuesday victories than Trump but by far larger margins.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders needed to keep the outcome at least moderately close in southern states with large black populations. Instead, he got smoked again. In Alabama, Clinton was leading about 80 per cent to 20 per cent as of 11 p.m.; in Texas, the state with the most delegates to earn, she was up 66 per cent to 31 per cent.

Clinton won Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Massachusetts and, according to the New York Times, Alaska. Sanders won his home state and three others that are also heavily white: Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma. But his margins of victory were not nearly large enough to compensate for his failures to make inroads with ethnic minorities in the south.

“All across our country today, Democrats voted to break down barriers so we can all rise together,” Clinton told a raucous crowd in Miami.

“America prospers when we all prosper,” she said, turning her attention to Trump. “America is strong when we're all strong. And we know we've got work to do. But that work is not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what's been hollowed.”

Sanders vowed to stay in the race for the long haul, noting that 35 states had not voted yet.

“Let me assure you, we are going to take our fight for economic justice, for social justice, for environmental sanity, for a world of peace, to every one of those states,” he said.

Trump, like Clinton, won in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Massachusetts. He added Vermont. Cruz won a do-or-die race in his native Texas, plus religious Oklahoma. Rubio won his first victory of the entire campaign in the Minnesota caucuses.

That triumph was little solace to a Republican establishment that had hoped Rubio would be either leading or the clear non-Trump alternative by now. He failed to win Virginia, where he was strong in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and he was uncompetitive in Massachusetts, which has a history of electing traditional Republicans. In other states, including massive Texas, he appeared to miss the 20 per cent threshold required to amass any delegates at all.

“He hasn't won anything,” Trump said in his post-victory appearance. “And he's not going to win much."

Cruz’s Texas and Oklahoma wins gave him the leeway to remain the race. But Trump beat him everywhere else in the region he had long considered crucial. As late as Monday night, he called Super Tuesday the single most important day of the campaign.

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Trump has now won in almost every part of the country, and he has prevailed on every voting day except for the first in Iowa. His latest triumphs came after a wild week of vicious campaigning and intraparty strife.

Trump earned his first major endorsement from the Republican elite when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie backed him. But numerous Republican activists and officials publicly declared they would not vote for him in a general election. And Trump drew widespread condemnation, including from Ryan, for refusing to denounce the Ku Klux Klan and its former leader, David Duke.

His supporters, as usual, didn’t care about the feelings of party grandees. In exit polls, more than half of Republican voters in Southern states said they felt betrayed by the party. In some states, three-quarters of Republican voters said they supported Trump’s proposal to “temporarily” ban Muslims from the country.

Rubio, the preferred candidate of the party’s traditional power structure, did not see appreciable results from his dramatic change in tactics over the past week. Once running as a sunny optimist, he had turned himself into a kind of quasi-Trump, savagely attacking the businessman on everything from his appearance to his branded ties to his failed “university.”

“Do not give in to the fear, do not give in to anger, do not give in to sham artists and con artists who try to take advantage of your suffering,” he said Tuesday.

Exit polls suggested he did relatively well with voters who decided their vote late in the race. But many of Trump’s supporters have been decided for weeks.

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