While Sanders’ fans would point to his lack of endorsements as a badge of honor – proof that he is not part of the Washington establishment that he and Republican Donald Trump both revile – the next president will be confronted with a long to-do list after years of political paralysis in the nation’s capital.
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Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont’s independent senator Bernie Sanders came out swinging today against President Barack Obama’s trade agenda and his opponent in the race, former Secretary of State, New York Senator, and First Lady, Hillary Clinton.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump continues to demonstrate a wide base of support, riding record turnouts to seven victories out of the 11 states where Republicans cast Super Tuesday ballots.
“I am a unifier, I know people are going to find that a little bit hard to believe, but believe me that I am a unifier”, Trump told his supporters.
And those states overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton last night.
Trump also beat his rivals among self-described moderates and those who said they were only “somewhat” conservative.
Overshadowed by Trump’s wins, Ted Cruz came in a close second in the night’s delegate haul, thanks to a win in his home state of Texas.
To cheers, she said: “When we stand together there is no barrier too big to break”.
And Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver argued that his Super Tuesday victories – Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Vermont – demonstrate Sanders can win among Latino voters and in rural areas. Cruz is favored to be the alternative to Trump, given that a loss in his home state would have effectively ended his campaign. Rubio has 110, Kasich has 25 and Ben Carson has eight. It takes 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination for president. “And in order to win that nomination we’re going to have to make very deliberate and strategic choices about the allocation of our resources”.
The next round of Democratic contests will be Saturday in Kansas, Louisiana and Nebraska.
Black voters powered Clinton to victory in SC last weekend and gave her a huge advantage throughout the South.
Increasingly, leading Republicans talk of a contested convention in July as their best remaining option for stopping Trump, whose divisive rhetoric about immigrants and ethnic and religious groups has some fearing a GOP wipeout in November.
“The Clinton campaign has the opportunity to pull away in the delegate count rather quickly because she has gained support from a broad cross section of the Democratic electorate”, added Williams. Nine in 10 of Trump’s voters were looking for an outsider, and half were angry with the government, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and television networks.
Against Rubio and Cruz, however, Clinton faces the same likability challenge in the polls. But while he has assembled a devoted following, Sanders still lacks Clinton’s national name recognition.
Speaking from his gold-flecked Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump asserted that his candidacy is a “movement” and he claimed he would unify the party was by training his fire on Clinton. “In America, we are going to end a corrupt campaign finance system”.
“All the pundits are calling the race for Clinton”.
The unrelenting division represented the biggest crisis for the GOP in decades, with the party seemingly on track to nominate a presidential candidate it can’t contain.
306 more Democratic delegates will be decided before the March 15 primaries with an additional 691 delegates being decided on that day.
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Republicans generally have the edge on the economy, terrorism, immigration and gun policy, while more voters choose either Sanders or Clinton on race relations and health care. Some influential outsiders even raise the option of forming a new party.
