Latest Super Tuesday was indeed super for Trump and Clinton

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David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

It was another Tuesday of tumult, triumph – and Trump.

The ultimate Republican outsider emerged victorious again. The establishment darling withdrew. The campaign laggard stayed alive by winning his own state. And the man claiming he is the best hope to stop Donald J. Trump from capturing the GOP presidential nomination is perhaps the most reviled senator in generations.

That's the result of Tuesday's balloting in the party that, within the lifetime of more than half the American people, once was a reliable redoubt of stability and a haven of steady habits.

At the same time, Tuesday's contests in the party that, in that same time period, was a maelstrom of upheaval, quietly moved closer to nominating the establishment front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who swept the evening.

Taken together, Tuesday night's results widened the leads held by Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton but, more fundamentally – and perhaps more significantly – they widened the distance between the conventions of American politics that have prevailed for generations and the new American politics that is emerging this winter.

It is a new politics of new allegiances (the less educated flocking to Mr. Trump, who holds an Ivy League degree, and the young lining up behind the oldest presidential candidate in history, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont); new forms of campaigning (Mr. Trump's drive for the White House is fed in the media by interviews and news coverage rather than by paid advertisements); and new extremes in rhetoric (Mr. Trump referred to news reporters last night as "disgusting," Ms. Clinton spoke of the "bluster and bigotry" of Mr. Trump, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas made a reference to Ms. Clinton sitting "in her jail cell.'')

Most presidential races have one Super Tuesday, but this remarkable, raucous campaign – a political struggle that has left all the rules, and the conventional expectations, in rubble – has had three.

This latest Super Tuesday was indeed super for Mr. Trump, whose decisive victory in Florida pushed Senator Marco Rubio, its native son (and onetime brightest hope) from the race. Mr. Trump finished the evening capturing twice as many new convention delegates as Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who in winning his own state was in some ways the big story of the evening.

This latest Super Tuesday provided Mr. Kasich with an infusion of new oxygen, though he has won no other state besides his own and has no clear route to the nomination save a hopelessly deadlocked convention in Cleveland this summer. There he is banking on a "home-field advantage" that by some estimates provides three points in the National Football League but that rarely means anything at American political conventions.

This latest Super Tuesday dealt a significant blow to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose only bright spot was a strong showing in Missouri, where he lost by two-10ths of a percentage point. He fell farther behind Ms. Clinton in delegates but, as a critic of the wealth gap, reinforced his position as the spiritual centre of the Democratic contest.

In her victory speech, Ms. Clinton pointedly borrowed themes from Mr. Sanders's campaign and sought to insulate herself from Mr. Sanders's critiques by explicitly targeting Wall Street, which has provided her with hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees, and criticizing what she called "overpaid corporate executives."

This latest Super Tuesday narrowed the Republican field by one-quarter, leaving only three GOP contenders and producing a struggle among Mr. Trump's rivals over who had the best chance to deny him the presidential nomination that may be within his reach.

"Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination – ours and Donald Trump's," said Mr. Cruz, who sought to marginalize Mr. Kasich and to transform the Republican race into a faceoff between the Manhattan billionaire and himself.

By the time the smoke cleared from Tuesday's battles, conducted in critical battleground states, Ms. Clinton had reinforced her comfortable lead over Mr. Sanders – seeming to end any question over who would be the Democrats' standard-bearer in November – and Mr. Trump had stepped closer to the Republican nomination.

The former appeared a lot more certain this morning than the latter, however.

Mr. Trump still must capture about three-fifths of the remaining convention delegates to win a first-ballot victory at the Republican convention. Despite overtures in the past week to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – both of whom have expressed qualms about Mr. Trump – the Republican establishment still has grave reservations about Mr. Trump and retains the hope that he might be denied the nomination.

That is the hope of Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich, who are in the position of taking succour from small victories and close calls. Those were not enough to keep Mr. Rubio in the race and in the end they may not be enough to sustain Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich.

So the race goes on – perhaps the most critical race of the age, certainly the most fascinating – but hardly the most uplifting.

The American writer H.L. Mencken's description of the 1924 Democratic convention – "It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious'' – might well be applied to the presidential race 92 years later. And for those who pine for a brokered convention, it might be well to remember that in 1924, the Democrats took 17 days and 193 ballots to select John W. Davis as their nominee. He won precisely one-quarter of the 48 states and about that percentage of the vote in a decisive loss to President Calvin Coolidge.