With as many as a dozen States holding their primaries on Tuesday, Republican and Democratic presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton appeared increasingly buoyant over their chances of securing their respective party nomination.
It, however, remained to be seen how the latest controversy involving Trump’s reluctance to denounce the ‘KKK’ white supremacist group plays out in the southern States that have large numbers of African-Americans. Both Trump and Clinton have been leading by large margins in several national polls in the run-up to ‘Super Tuesday’. By far the most positive for them has been Monday’s CNN/ORC poll, putting Trump at a whopping 49% against Marco Rubio’s 16% and Ted Cruz’s 15%. A Real Clear Politics average put the three at 35.6%, 17.4% and 19.8% respectively.
On the Democratic side, Clinton was happily placed with 55% in the CNN poll as against her sole rival Bernie Sanders’ 38%. The gap was narrower in the Real Clear Politics average: 49.6% to 40%.
Texas, the biggest among the 12 ‘Super Tuesday’ States, has Cruz in the lead, while it’s Trump in most of the other States — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
In interviews to major television networks just as voting was getting under way on Tuesday morning, Trump dismissed projections that Cruz or Rubio would have a better chance to defeat Clinton in the general elections than himself.