WASHINGTON, March 1 (UPI) — Donald Trump has won six states on Super Tuesday, continuing to roll toward the Republican presidential nomination, early returns indicate.
Trump has won in Georgia, Virginia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama, continuing to demonstrate his strength in all regions of the country.
Trump did not, however, win the night’s single biggest prize: Texas. Several media outlets project the Lonestar State will go for native son Sen. Ted Cruz, who badly needed a victory there to keep his campaign alive.
Cruz is also projected to win in neighboring Oklahoma, making him the only candidate to win multiple states other than Trump and, with Iowa, gives him three victories in the Republican campaign so far.
The Oklahoma victory is significant because it is the first “closed” primary — meaning only registered Republicans, and not independents, are permitted to vote. The victory bolsters the Cruz campaign’s argument he is the candidate best positioned to halt Trump’s march to the nomination this summer.
Super Tuesday is the single most important day on the path to the nomination and offered Trump, as the party’s front-runner, the opportunity to deal knockout blows to several of his opponents. He appears to have missed that chance in Texas, where a Cruz victory assures the first term senator will continue to campaign.
Georgia, which went for Trump, is the second-largest of 12 states that were up for grabs on Tuesday. It was called for Trump immediately after polls closed at 7 p.m. in the east.
Trump has already won in the Midwest, in Iowa, the Northeast in New Hampshire, and in the Rocky Mountain West, in Nevada.
As the victories pile up, so does Trump’s all-important delegate count. While the specific delegate count will not be clear until all returns are in, Trump will hold a commanding lead after Tuesday’s vote.
In a wide-ranging press conference after his several victories, Trump congratulated Cruz on his Texas victory. He was not so kind to another rival.
In Virginia, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio had hoped to score an upset on Super Tuesday. CNN projects he will finish second in that state.
“I feel awfully good,” Trump said. “They are certainly being very nice to me tonight (on cable news). And they are declaring Marco Rubio the big loser of the night. And it’s true, he hasn’t won anything. … He’s a lightweight.”
Later in the night, CNN projected Rubio will win the Minnesota Republican caucus, his first victory of the campaign.
Speaking to supporters in Texas, Cruz sought to portray his Super Tuesday victories as proof he is the lone candidate remaining in the GOP race who can stop Trump. He called on other Republicans to drop out and unite behind him.
“Republicans, together, we have a choice,” Cruz said. “For the candidates who have not yet won a state … I ask you to prayerfully consider our coming together, uniting. … That is the only way to beat Donald Trump. Head-to-head, our campaign beats Donald Trump resoundingly. But for that to happen, we must come together.”
Rubio, speaking to CNN after the speeches from Trump and Cruz, sought to spin his lackluster performance as worse news for Cruz, who had hoped to mount a challenge to Trump by winning in Southern states where Trump dominated on Tuesday.
“The terrain gets better for us now,” Rubio said. “Tonight was supposed to be Ted Cruz’s big night, not a night where he won two states. He was supposed to have that Southern firewall. It never materialized.”
“We never said we were going to win on Super Tuesday,” Rubio said.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich failed to claim a Super Tuesday prize. He is running a strong second to Trump in Vermont and finished a distant second — and in a virtual tie with Rubio — in Massachusetts.
The contest will now shift to Rubio’s home turf in Florida on March 15, where Rubio will face a do-or-die moment for his presidential campaign. Polls show Trump with a big lead over Rubio in Florida.
Trump withstood the latest in a long line of racial controversies he generated when he failed over the weekend to immediately disavow support from former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
Trump, who sparked controversy by calling many Mexican migrants to the United States “criminals” and “rapists,” later back-tracked on the KKK question. In the interview, he said he’d never heard of David Duke, the KKK leader in question.
Later, Trump pointed to a press conference last week where he distanced himself from Duke’s support. A day later, Trump said he was unable to hear CNN’s interviewer, Jake Tapper, due to a malfunctioning ear piece.
The controversy’s effect on Super Tuesday voters wasn’t immediately clear, but it was clearly an issue during a raucous Trump rally at Valdosta State University in Georgia while voting was still happening there. Several protesters from the group Black Lives Matter were thrown out — hardly a new sight at Trump rallies across the country.
Rubio barnstormed five states on Monday before settling into a full day of campaign events in Minnesota ahead of that state’s unpredictable caucus, where he hoped to pull out his first first-place finish of the campaign. He will hold an election night rally in his home state of Florida.
Cruz voted for himself in Houston and made a last-ditch pitch for one vote, speaking to a woman who described herself as Republican and a Trump supporter outside his polling place. With a dozen television cameras trained on the pair, the woman asked Cruz the singular question of the campaign for months: “Why should I cast my vote for you instead of Donald Trump?”
