Donald J. Trump crushed his Republican opponents in Pennsylvania, Maryland and three other states on Tuesday, a sweep that put him considerably closer to capturing the party's presidential nomination outright, while Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware and was battling to amass enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination as early as mid-May.
Though Trump was widely expected to dominate the primaries, his margins of victory represented a breakthrough: He received 55 percent to 60 percent of the vote in some states, after months of winning many primaries with less than a majority.
Trump's success intensified the aura of inevitability around his bid to lead the Republicans, and created urgent new challenges for his rivals. More significant, it increased his chances of avoiding a fight on the floor of the party's convention in July and of claiming the nomination on the delegates' first ballot.
"When the boxer knocks out the other boxer, you don't have to wait around for a decision," he said boastfully at an election-night appearance before supporters at Trump Tower in New York.
The other Republican candidates, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, fared so poorly on Tuesday that they were likely to lose most of the 118 bound delegates up for grabs across the Northeast. Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware also went for Trump.
Cruz is now under growing pressure to beat Trump in Indiana's primary next week, perhaps the last real chance the stop-Trump forces have to halt his march to the nomination. He and Kasich forged an alliance to thwart Trump in Indiana, but it has yet to show signs of working.
Even before polls closed in the East on Tuesday night, Cruz tried to pre-empt the rush of coverage about Trump's dominance.
"Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain," Cruz told supporters in the Knightstown, Indiana, gymnasium where the high school basketball movie "Hoosiers," about underdogs who triumph over a big-city rival, was filmed.
On the Democratic side, while Sen. Bernie Sanders won the primary in Rhode Island, Clinton was poised to pick up significantly more delegates than he in Maryland and Pennsylvania in particular. Her advisers predicted that she would net at least 30 more pledged delegates overall — and perhaps significantly more — to add to her lead of about 240 going into the primaries.
Clinton advisers said Tuesday's final delegate tally would reveal not if, but when, Clinton would win the nomination: either in early June, if she continues at her current pace, or as soon as the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on May 17, if she does better than expected in the coming weeks, once her support from more than 500 superdelegates is included. Superdelegates could switch their votes at any point, but Clinton's are widely considered to be staunch supporters.
Clinton predicted that she would return to Philadelphia this summer for the Democratic convention "with the most votes and the most pledged delegates."
She pledged to unify the party, telling Sanders supporters that "there is much more that unites us than divides us," but she also looked past him as she took a swipe at Trump and his campaign motto, "Make America Great Again."
"Despite what other candidates say, we believe in the goodness of our people and the greatness of our nation," Clinton said.
Sanders, speaking Tuesday night to an audience of 6,500 people in West Virginia, which votes May 10, said emphatically that he would stay in the race. He made an unusually pointed appeal to superdelegates, arguing that he had won more votes from independents and from Republicans than Clinton and would be a stronger general election candidate.
"As of today, we have won 16 primaries and caucuses all over this country, and with your help we're going to win here in West Virginia," Sanders said.
For all his fortitude, Sanders plans to reassess his candidacy on Wednesday and decide whether to adjust his strategy if Clinton's delegate lead appears all but insurmountable. His senior strategist, Tad Devine, said the Sanders team would discuss a range of issues including how to adjust messaging about the nominating process and what route if any there is to winning it. Devine said he could still see a mathematical path to securing the nomination but added that, if it changed, the campaign would have to adjust.
"If we are sitting here and there's no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be up front about that," Devine said Tuesday.
The broad support for Trump spanned some of the dividing lines that have characterized the Republican race until now: He won among the affluent and college-educated as well as with blue-collar voters and those with no more than a high school education, according to exit polls.
But the unease about Trump's candidacy in some quarters of the party persisted, a potential warning sign if he emerges as the nominee. About a quarter of Republican primary voters in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania said they would not support him if he were the party's nominee. The resistance to Trump was greatest among Kasich's supporters, who are more moderate-leaning: Six in 10 said they would not vote for Trump in November.
Clinton was lifted once again by strong backing from blacks and older voters, but she also ran stronger with white voters than she has in many states. In Pennsylvania, she narrowly won among whites. Her performance was even better in Maryland, where she carried white voters by 12 points.
Trump's advantage across all five states was so forbidding that Cruz abandoned the Northeast entirely on Saturday, and Kasich was left to pick up stray delegates. Clinton and Sanders campaigned aggressively in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but they focused largely on policy issues like fracking, gun control and Wall Street reform rather than sniping at each other as they did in a raucous televised debate in Brooklyn.
There were 118 Republican delegates up for grabs on Tuesday, along with 54 more unbound delegates elected from Pennsylvania, giving Trump the opportunity to accumulate enough to push his total share well over 900 heading into the final 10 states casting ballots. He would need 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination before the party gathers for its convention in July.
Not only did Trump have significant prospects for a substantial delegate haul Tuesday, a week after his dominating performance in New York, he also had the opportunity to send a clear message to party leaders and other Republicans that resistance to his nomination is futile.
Trump's path toward a delegate majority becomes far clearer if Cruz is unable to defeat him in Indiana. That is why Cruz left Pennsylvania on Saturday to head to Indiana, and he plans to campaign there as aggressively as he has anywhere since the Iowa caucuses, where he scored a surprise victory.
The stakes for Cruz are so high that, within political circles, speculation has been swirling this week that he would try to change the subject from his latest losses and announce his pick for vice president before the primary in Indiana. Advisers to Cruz were cagey about whether he would take such an extraordinary step in an effort to win Indiana, where polls last week put Trump ahead. But the advisers did not dismiss the possibility, an indication that they were thinking about such a move, wanted to keep the speculation alive, or both.
But Trump has no intention of giving Cruz the opening in Indiana he so plainly needs. He planned a rally Wednesday night in Indianapolis with a beloved figure in the state who has also been known to speak his mind and find controversy: Bobby Knight, the former Indiana University men's basketball coach.
The two Democrats have also been eyeing Indiana, with Clinton campaigning there on Tuesday, but she and Sanders were chiefly preoccupied with Pennsylvania, where 210 delegates were at stake, the day's largest prize.
Clinton narrowly beat Barack Obama in the Indiana primary in 2008, winning support from a sizable majority of white voters — who made up nearly 80 percent of the electorate in that primary — while Obama won about 90 percent of the black vote. In the 2016 primaries and caucuses, Sanders has often beaten Clinton among white voters, especially white men, and he also performs well with independents, young people and college students, all of whom were expected to be forces in Indiana.
But Clinton supporters said that her performance Tuesday — and her rout of Sanders in New York last week — would give her an advantage in Indiana.
"While our area has lost a lot of good-paying manufacturing jobs, and Senator Sanders has a way of tapping into that, I think Democrats are ready to rally around Mrs. Clinton and help her get ready to take on Trump and the Republicans" said Dennis Tyler, a Clinton backer who is mayor of Muncie, Indiana, in a county Clinton carried eight years ago.
Sanders advisers have been steadily optimistic about winning Indiana, but they also acknowledged that a victory there would not matter much if Sanders fell even further behind Clinton in the race for delegates. Devine, the senator's strategist, said Tuesday that Sanders "can't afford to lose ground in delegates," and added, "if we do, we may have to go back to the drawing board."