Super Tuesday is likely to live up to its billing for Donald Trump.
The first day of multiple-state voting looms large in a wild presidential race after early states trimmed the field and the brash billionaire and his army of outsider voters are positioned to send panic through the Republican establishment by tightening his grip on the party’s nomination.
Hillary Clinton — boosted by her huge win in South Carolina on Saturday — is meanwhile hoping to start locking out her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, who is giving her a tougher-than-expected challenge, by showing the strength of the Southern foundation of minority voters on which her campaign is built.
A CNN/ORC national poll out Monday shows Donald Trump in a dominant lead, getting 49% of the Republican primary vote — 30 percentage points ahead of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. On the Democratic side, Clinton tops Sanders 55% to 38%.
The contests, across 12 states, herald several weeks of nationwide skirmishes that will be decisive in determining who gets to face off for the White House in the fall.
The sheer scale of the battlefield favors Trump, whose ubiquitous media profile means he is known everywhere, and Clinton, whose decades in public life give her an advantage over the lesser-known Sanders.
It’s Trump who may stand tallest on Tuesday night.
“On Tuesday, you have a big day,” Trump told supporters at a big rally in Tennessee on Saturday, saying he didn’t care if someone was at death’s door or if their wife was leaving them — they had to vote.
“You get up, you go to the polls, and you vote!” he said. “I promise you, that you are going to look back on this night and you are going to say this was a very important night … a very important evening in your life.”
While Trump expects to savor a night of triumph, his top rivals, Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have lesser expectations. Rubio is desperate to at last secure an elusive win, somewhere, anywhere. And Cruz faces a make-or-break moment in his home state of Texas.
A total of 595 Republican delegates are up for grabs of the 1,237 needed to clinch the GOP nomination. Sanders and Clinton are facing off for 865 of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the Democratic race.
Republicans are competing for delegates to be awarded Tuesday in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.
Democrats will award delegates in the same states as Republicans, apart from Alaska, and they are also competing in Colorado and in American Samoa.
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