Trump, Clinton head to Super Tuesday with momentum

Ahead of Super Tuesday, Democrat Hillary Clinton holds a large lead among the state's Democratic voters while an average of opinion polls show Trump is favored to win the state's Republican primary on Super Tuesday.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released yesterday, Trump expanded his lead capturing the support of nearly half of Republican voters and Clinton's lead over Bernie Sanders by 20 points, the CNN reported.

Hillary Clinton resoundingly reclaimed her standing as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination with a lopsided victory over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, giving her momentum heading into the Super Tuesday contests in multiple states.

For Sanders, the roughly 50-point defeat crystalized his weakness with black voters, a crucial segment of the Democratic electorate. If he loses blacks by similar margins in the Southern states that vote Tuesday, Clinton would likely take a delegate lead difficult for the Vermont senator to overcome. As Clinton relished the most sweeping victory of her political career, her focus was already on Super Tuesday and the general election.

"Despite what you hear, we don't need to make America great again," Clinton said at a rally Saturday night, alluding to Republican front-runner Donald Trump and his campaign slogan. "America has never stopped being great," Clinton declared. Sanders acknowledged getting "decimated" in South Carolina, but said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that his campaign is "looking to the future, not looking back" as the contests move outside the South.

Like Clinton, Trump has won three of the four early voting contests. He's cleared the field of nearly all his rivals, but is engaged in an increasingly bitter contest with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, two senators scrambling to stop the billionaire from running away with the Republican nomination. On Tuesday, Republicans will be voting in 11 states, with 595 delegates at stake. Cruz acknowledged that a strong showing by Trump on Tuesday could perhaps seal the nomination for the real estate magnate. The Texas senator told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that "there is no doubt that if Donald steamrolls through Super Tuesday, wins everywhere with big margins, that he may well be unstoppable."

Super Tuesday has been considered as a turning point of the presidential race as it is when the largest number of U.S. states will cast votes for Republican and Democratic candidates and the larger number of delegates is chosen than any other single day. Voters in a total of 12 states and one territory will be heading to the polls. Republicans will allocate 595 delegates from the results of Super Tuesday, nearly half of the 1,237 needed for the nomination. Democrats will allocate 865, more than one-third of the necessary 2,383. As enormous as the prize is on Tuesday, no one candidate can win their party's nomination that day. Delegates will be divided up according to how well each contender does.