Democrats and Republicans ratified their respective front-runners on Super Tuesday — and the two winners revealed two parties galloping in radically divergent directions.
The Democrats’ top priority in coalescing behind Hillary Clinton: running the country.
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The GOP’s top priority: venting rage at how the country is being run, represented by the pursed-lip personage of Donald Trump.
Falling in line behind Trump (who won seven states but lost Texas) and Clinton (who also took seven states), the parties bucked conventional wisdom about where they ought to be after eight years of Barack Obama. You’d think an out-of-power Republican Party would opt for a consensus candidate like George W. Bush to blaze a trail out of the wilderness. But an ornery, anxious GOP base dove deeper into the woods and selected the wildest candidate out there.
Democrats — moving in the opposite direction — told Bernie Sanders they don’t want a revolution. The Vermont senator — earnest shield-bearer for jilted progressives who believe Obama didn’t go far enough on health care, income inequality and trade policy — stalled in the South and faded in the North. Clinton, who has embraced a message of experience and stability that didn’t much help her in ’08, converted a powerful wave of counter-revolutionary fervor into a commanding lead among delegates.
Here are five takeaways from the biggest night of 2016 thus far:

1. Trump is resilient. The last two weeks have not been kind to Donald Trump — Marco Rubio, at long last, subjected him to Trump-ian rhetorical waterboarding, mocking his continence, conjecturing on his spray-tan practices, even opining lewdly about his (lack of) sexual prowess. More importantly, the gates of oppo opened up on the front-runner with a series of damaging stories about the now-defunct Trump University and his use of immigrant labor on construction projects. He underperformed some pre-Super Tuesday polling (especially in Virginia) but he held his double-digit leads in the South, the backbone of his party.

And that’s why he’s likely to be the nominee. Here’s a man who talks like an Astoria insurance salesman, sports the mid-life crisis comb-over of a guy cruising Queens Boulevard in a Camaro and sleeps in sumptuous apartment towers on Fifth Avenue — and he’s absolutely killing it south of the Mason-Dixon. It turns out Donald Trump’s gut-level populist pitch is tailor-made for the South: Despite his “New York values,” he handily defeated Cruz in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

Why does it matter? Any Republican nominee will romp in these states — the GOP has owned the South since Nixon. But Trump isn’t George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. He’s not a native son, but he’s got a unique feel for the grievances of disaffected, older white voters who love him despite his regional differences. And that speaks to a broader appeal that will make him a serious threat to Clinton in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan despite his vulnerabilities.

2. Clinton’s perfectly happy to run against Trump. Talk to Democratic operatives and people close to the Clintons and they will repeat the same mantra over and over: Wild-card Trump presents a unique threat to their paint-within-the-lines candidate, especially in a debate setting where she might freeze in the face of his personal attacks.

And sure enough, Trump tried to head off an insurrection in his party over his candidacy by calling for his opponents to unite with him against their common enemy. “I’m going to go after one person, Hillary Clinton,” he assured the bludgeoned Cruzes, Rubios, Bushes and Fiorinas of the world.

But for all their dutiful hand-wringing about Trump, the Clinton camp is, by and large, pleased to have him as an opponent. Their preferred adversary, judging from a very informal canvas of a half-dozen people in Clinton’s orbit over the last few weeks, would have been Cruz. His positions, they opined, were extreme enough to galvanize the party’s base — but he mostly plays by the rules, and Clinton could game out his behavior. Trump is far less predictable, and that poses real dangers to the former secretary of state — but he is also a general election-turnout magnet, especially for black and Hispanic voters.

“It’s a trade-off,” said a senior Clinton aide. “But, ultimately, he’s probably going to be one of the worst general-election candidates in history … and oh, yeah, he’s starting a civil war in his own party.”

3. Ted’s not dead. Yet. It’s probably a lot safer to declare Clinton the prohibitive favorite to win her party’s nomination than it is to coronate Trump — for no other reason than Ted Cruz just won the biggest delegate prize so far, his home state of Texas, and took the smaller prize of neighboring Oklahoma as well as Alaska. Add Iowa and Cruz has the appearance of a viable, deadly serious Trump challenger with enough momentum to pose a major challenge.

But even his own people admit he’s less of a threat than appearances suggest. The math just doesn’t quite add up for the Texas tea partier — unless tonight’s victories spawn a major wave of anti-Trump momentum, spurred perhaps by the (possible) exit of fellow evangelical conservative Ben Carson. Despite the Donald’s somewhat tenuous grasp of biblical chapter and verse, Trump bested Cruz with evangelicals in Southern states outside the Lone Star.

And Trump’s appeal is far broader than Cruz’s in the North and industrial Midwest. He enjoys an advantage in almost of all of the big March 15 states (with the exception of Ohio, which is leaning toward native son John Kasich). Cruz’s path seems virtually impossible if he can’t somehow clear out Carson, Rubio and Kasich to emerge as the sole champion of anti-Trump voters. Before the polls closed Tuesday, he stuck a needle in his struggling fellow senator, suggesting that Trump’s dominance in Florida polls were reason enough for Rubio to retire from the field. “There is no doubt that any candidate who cannot win his home state has real problems,” Cruz taunted.

Still, he’s got his own problems: Cruz’s former communications director Rick Tyler, speaking on POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, suggested his ex-boss had “a narrow” path to the nomination and might only prevail at a brokered convention.

4. Bernie Sanders: Money for nothing? You know a campaign is in trouble when they send out a press release touting a “Path Forward Breakfast” slated for Wednesday to explain how they plan to soldier on after a decidedly not-so-Super Tuesday. No doubt about it, Sanders’ presidential hopes are on life support after a string of big blowouts in the South, but it’s a gold-plated, diamond studded ventilator thanks to his defeat-defying online fundraising operation.

Sanders has outraised Clinton decisively since the beginning of the year (scoring a record-breaking $40 million in February — including an amazing $5 million day) and he likely outspent her in Nevada and South Carolina, according to sources in both campaigns, burning through cash at a faster rate than Clinton’s Brooklyn operation.
His reward? A string of game-changing defeats.

On Tuesday, Clinton racked up huge delegate-grabbing victories in Virginia, Texas and other states throughout the Deep South — and she stole Massachusetts, which had seemed like a Sanders safe space after New Hampshire. Sanders snared his share, adding home-state Vermont along with Minnesota, Colorado and Oklahoma to his tally.

Top Sanders adviser Tad Devine, a veteran of several other Democratic presidential campaigns, has predicted Sanders’ online fundraising prowess will continue in spite of the losses — and he thinks it will allow him to fight on longer than would a conventional candidate who might otherwise be abandoned by big-money donors.

But how long? And toward what end? Devine has said Sanders is in it to win it, but his own candidate sounded a slightly less optimistic tone during his brief victory speech in Burlington — saying not once, but twice, that he was running not merely to get elected but to spark a “political revolution.”

5. Did John Kasich wreck Rubio? If Rubio ends 2016 as an also-ran — and that appears increasingly likely after a deeply disappointing Tuesday — he might have the feisty Ohio governor to blame. Rubio, a perennial silver and bronze medalist, won only Minnesota on Tuesday and came within 30,000 or so votes of inserting himself back in the middle of the race with an upset of Trump in Virginia.

Rubio, a well-liked candidate without a fixed constituency who mercilessly battered Trump for the last week, finally found his people in the high-income, high-education, high-Trump-hating D.C. burbs. And he might have won too — if the damn-near-moderate Ohio governor didn’t appeal to the same demographic and gobble up 100,000 votes. Trump underperformed, but he still beat Rubio by 35 to 32 percent, and holds a commanding advantage over the Florida senator ahead of his home-state primary in two weeks.

“I think he has to get out,” Trump told Fox News in a phone interview.

Rubio won’t. But the clock is ticking.