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Trump, Clinton Look to Widen Leads on Super Tuesday | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are expected to win most of the states voting on Super Tuesday. (Gretchen Ertl, Adrees Latif/Reuters)


Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are expected to win most of the states voting on Super Tuesday. (Gretchen Ertl, Adrees Latif/Reuters)

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are expected to win most of the states voting on Super Tuesday. (Gretchen Ertl, Adrees Latif/Reuters)

Front-runner Donald Trump might be in an unassailable position to take firm control of the Republican presidential race when 11 states vote on Tuesday. The brash billionaire and his army of outsider voters are positioned to frighten through the Republican establishment by narrowing his grip on the party’s nomination.

“On Tuesday, you have a big day,” Trump told supporters at a big rally in Tennessee on Saturday, saying they had to vote even if someone was at death’s door or if their wife was leaving them.

“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.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could find herself in a similarly dominant position in the Democratic race, can go a long way toward hushing concerns about her candidacy with big victories of her own over democratic socialist Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday.

Both Trump and Clinton head into the most important day yet in the 2016 election leading their respective races.

Trump was winning in almost all the states that will hold primary contests or caucuses, most of them in the American South. The only exception seemed to be Texas, where U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who represents that state, enjoyed a narrow lead and was in desperate need of a victory.

Super Tuesday is considered the biggest single day of state-by-state presidential nominating contests for the Nov. 8 election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.

Trump, a New York real estate developer and former reality TV star, has stirred controversy with campaign pledges to build a wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico and deport 11 million illegal immigrants.

With a series of victories on Tuesday, he would be a step closer to sealing the nomination against opposition from Cruz, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Ohio Governor John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

On the eve of voting, Cruz and Rubio call on Trump to ask the New York Times to release an audiotape of an interview he gave to the newspaper’s editorial board on Jan. 5, which they believe will reveal that Trump does not support his own immigration policy. The Trump campaign had no immediate response.