The big stories? Showman billionaire Donald Trump has all but implemented a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and Sen. Hillary Clinton — helped by whopping margins from African-American voters — had a big night that should help her in her big battle to beat back a challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The biggest story? The Donald Trump steamroller continues to flatten the GOP establishment, embarrass those who’ve said he never could win — and definitively answered whether he is a viable national Republican candidate, whether critics agree with him or not. And there were signs that GOPers who had swore he was the worst thing since green bread were accepting he’d be their nominee — and figuring out what to do. If you had a bet? Expect most GOPers to eventually vote for the party’s nominee and for talk radio hosts (except Glen Beck) to start falling in line urging their (loyal and obedient) listeners to back Trump, arguing he can beat Clinton.

B-U-T it isn’t over until this lady sings, and although she has started to warble, she isn’t done yet.

Here’s a roundup of reaction to the massive Super Tuesday vote. Note that these are excerpts so go to the links to read the articles and posts in full.

The New York Times:

Voters in 12 states cemented front-runner status for Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton by handing them sweeping victories on Super Tuesday, the largest voting day of primaries and caucuses for both parties.

Here’s what happened:

• Donald J. Trump, underscoring his lead in the race, won the Republican primaries in six states. He took Virginia, a bellwether state that had been coveted by Senator Marco Rubio. He expanded his reach in the South with victories in Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee. (Analysts had expected him to dominate there because of his success in appealing to evangelicals.) He also won in Massachusetts, where his message resonated with many working-class voters.

• But Senator Ted Cruz held off Mr. Trump to win Texas, his home state. A loss for Mr. Cruz here would’ve been devastating, potentially a fatal blow to his presidential ambitions. Mr. Cruz saw his second victory of the night in Oklahoma.

• Hillary Clinton also swept to victory in six Democratic state primaries, winning Virginia and Georgia — which she lost to Barack Obama in 2008 — as well as Alabama, Tennessee, Texas and Arkansas, where, of course, she had been first lady. Her victories, some by big margins, put pressure on her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, to show he can win outside the Northeast.

• Mr. Sanders triumphed over Mrs. Clinton in his home state, Vermont. This was one contest he could not afford to lose. In a speech after his victory, he told supporters, “This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about making a political revolution.” He also won Oklahoma.

• “What a super Tuesday,” Mrs. Clinton jubilantly greeted supporters in Florida. In a clear dig at Mr. Trump’s campaign mantra, she said: “America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole.” She added, “Instead of building walls, we’re going to break down barriers and build ladders of opportunities and empowerment.”

• Mr. Trump also stood before supporters in Florida after his string of victories. And it was — in keeping with the Republican front-runner’s penchant for spectacle — a spectacle. He was introduced by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who recently stunned supporters by endorsing his former rival.

The Washington Post:

As Donald Trump rampaged through the Super Tuesday states, adding Massachusetts and Georgia and Virginia to his map, the Republican Party’s mainstream decided to trade panic for hope.

“Trump is not sweeping the Super Tuesday states as expected,” said Katie Packer, the Republican strategist whose Our Principles PAC was loading new attack spots for the mid-March primaries.

“This is exactly how Democrats governed for 50 years,” said GOP activist Grover Norquist, stepping out of the annual dinner of the American Spectator magazine. “They owned the states. They occasionally won the presidency.”

If this did not sound like the reactions of people watching a hostile takeover of their political home, it was because their eyes were adjusting to a new reality. In the hours before the polls closed, some elected Republicans said they would refuse to support a Trump candidacy. More said he was dreadful, but they would support the ticket. And some thinkers, more aligned with the conservative movement than any party, were making contingency plans in case they needed to split.

The first group included Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), a retiring moderate whose district was decisively won by Trump. Hours before the polls closed he released an open letter on a Virginia conservative blog promising not to vote for Trump, but not endorsing any other candidate.

“My love for our country eclipses my loyalty to our party,” said Rigell, “and to live with a clear conscience I will not support a nominee so lacking in the judgement, temperament and character needed to be our nation’s commander-in-chief.”

Rigell had company, with Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) saying that they could not support Trump either — Sasse even saying he would favor the creation of a new party if Trump won the primaries. But more Republicans were choosing to wait it out, following Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in condemning Trump’s behavior.

That attitude was not matched by the conservative base. Randy Barnett, the libertarian attorney whose thinking informed the near-miss lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, wrote in USA Today that Trump was creating the conditions for a new “Constitution Party,” an ideologically pure breakaway.

“If the Democrats succeed in collapsing a Trump campaign — as I believe they can and will — then GOP voters can seamlessly shift to the new party,” he wrote, suggesting that this party also nominate a candidate for president. “If this happens, such a party can either actually win outright or throw the election into the House, which is allowed to pick from the top candidates, in this case, three.”

Erick Erickson, the conservative media mogul who disinvited Trump from his summer conference, agreed with Barnett.

“Controlling so many state legislatures and Governors mansions could be advantageous in access for a Republican third party bid,” he wrote at his site, the Resurgent. “Many of those incumbents understand that their survival depends on an alternative to Donald Trump.”

USA Today’s Susan Page offers five lessons learned from the votes so far. Some chunks of them:

1. The GOP is fracturing

For a sense of just how fractured the GOP is, consider this: The top Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate went before reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday to denounce the stance taken by the GOP’s likely presidential nominee.

There were spurred by Trump’s initial failure to denounce white supremacist groups that are embracing his candidacy…

Trump has never sought or served in public office before. He hasn’t even been a reliable Republican voter in the past, and he’s regularly contributed to Democratic and Republican campaigns. But it’s not his political history but his unpredictable positions and divisive rhetoric that alarm the GOP establishment.

Some view Trump’s prospective nomination as a sort of hostile takeover, although they so far have failed to devise a way to block him or even coalesce effectively behind a single rival to challenge him head-to-head. As a nominee, they fear he not only would be crushed in a landslide but also would undermine Republican candidates down the ballot — including those in a swing states trying to hold a half-dozen Senate seats crucial to keeping GOP control. An anti-Trump super PAC called Our Principles is ramping up its operations…
…2. Democrats face an enthusiasm gap
In every contest leading up to Super Tuesday, Democratic turnout has been way down while Republican turnout was way up. Trump brags that’s good news for Republicans. “We’ve actually expanded the party,” he said Tuesday night…
…3. Americans are mad
Voters who are angry about an economy that only seems to reward the rich, worried about the future of their kids and dismayed by a dysfunctional political system that doesn’t seem able to get things done have fueled the surprises of the 2016 campaign.

The heir to the GOP’s leading dynasty? Out of the race despite the race’s richest war chest. The nation’s longest-serving governor? Didn’t make it to the starting gate. The governors of Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey and Wisconsin? Gone.

Instead, a real-estate mogul and political outsider Tuesday was building a delegate lead in the Republican race, and the once-formidable front-runner on the Democratic side seemed to doing the same against an unlikely rival — a 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont…
….4. White House doors have opened wider
Trump’s caustic rhetoric on immigration that portrays Mexicans as criminals and Muslims as too dangerous to allow to enter the United States, at least for now, may have obscured a notable development in the 2016 campaign: an expanding tolerance for who can mount a credible campaign for president.

In the opening Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton became the first woman and Ted Cruz the first Latino to win the presidential nominating contest of a major party. In New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish candidate to win a primary. That night, Donald Trump became the first outsider (that is, someone who has never held office before) to win a primary since the modern nominating system emerged more than a half-century ago.

Even on age: Marco Rubio (44 years old) and Cruz (45) are among the youngest serious contenders ever for the White House. And Clinton (68), Trump (69) and Sanders (74) are among the oldest….
….5. All roads lead to Florida — and November
…Florida isn’t a Super Tuesday state. But both candidates had good reason to be there. The Sunshine State will award a trove of convention delegates in its primary in two weeks, particularly on the Republican side, where the winner-takes-all. It’s a chance for Trump to vanquish Rubio in his home state (or for Rubio to stage a comeback) and for Clinton to widen her lead over Sanders (or for him to stage a surprise).

Then there’s November. Florida is one of the nation’s quintessential swing states in presidential elections, and Clinton aimed her victory speech not at her primary rival but at her likely general-election opponent.

The Huffington Post on Chris Christie as Trump’s opening act for his victory remarks:

When Trump came to the podium to speak, Christie stood behind him with a blank expression on his face.

Christie’s uncharacteristically scripted and soft-spoken speech is another example of the governor allowing Trump to demean him since Christie endorsed the real estate mogul on Friday.

Trump was caught on tape treating Christie like a lackey. And Christie embarrassed himself on national television trying to reconcile his endorsement of Trump with their vehement disagreement on a host of key issues.

But it was Christie’s timid-seeming platitudes and demeanor on Tuesday that opened the floodgates, eliciting mockery from all corners of the Internet.

Many observers likened Christie to a hostage reading a ransom note, causing #FreeChrisChristie to trend on Twitter in Washington, D.C.

It is no wonder that Trump felt at ease ripping Nabisco, a company headquartered in Christie’s state.

The Los Angeles Times:

Hillary Clinton emerged from Super Tuesday having regained the mantle of prohibitive frontrunner, decisively winning the biggest and most important states in an election that confirmed her overwhelming support from minority voters and left her rival with no clear opening to catch her.

Clinton appeared likely to rack up twice as many delegates from Tuesday’s contests as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, as she swept through the South with crushing victories in delegate-rich states including Georgia, Virginia and Texas. She also won a narrow victory in Massachusetts.

Along the way, Clinton won more than 8 in 10 African American voters taking part in primaries as well as two-thirds of the Latino voters in Texas and a majority of white voters in at least six of the 11 states holding Democratic nominating contests.

Her double-digit margins of victory in state after state, including Tennessee, Alabama, and her former home of Arkansas, moved the race into a new phase in which she can now focus on attacking GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, rather than tangling with Sanders, the 74-year-old democratic socialist whose earnest campaign has embarrassed her political machine at several turns.

As expected, Sanders won his home state of Vermont. He vowed to keep fighting all the way to the Democratic convention this summer in Philadelphia.

Sanders also prevailed in Oklahoma and in caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, according to early returns and exit polls.

Clinton, however, largely ignored Sanders as she spoke to supporters in Miami, where early voting already has begun ahead of Florida’s March 15 primary. Instead, she aimed her verbal barbs at Trump.

“The stakes of this election have never been higher. The rhetoric we’re hearing on the other side has never been lower,” she said. “Trying to divide America between us and them is wrong and we are not going to let it work. Whether we like it or not we are all in this together.”

The speech reflected the impact Sanders has had on the race, even as Clinton starts to build a lead over him that is looking increasingly insurmountable.

ABC’s Rick Klein looks at the panic and grief within the GOP establishment:

This is what a party meltdown looks like.

Faced with the increasing likelihood of a Donald Trump nomination, the Republican Party and its voters are headed in opposite directions — with destructive potential consequences the likes of which no major political party has seen in more than a century.

Republican voters are on the verge of selecting a nominee. The party establishment, meanwhile, is largely in panic mode — with talk of a contested convention or third-party candidacies suddenly the most realistic ways to block a candidate they fear will harm the GOP for decades.

Why panic? On the single biggest day of voting until November, the leading Republican candidate is defending his decision to not immediately condemn white supremacists.

The speaker of the House — the highest-ranking Republican in office — held a news conference to denounce the front-runner’s action. The party’s most recent nominee labeled it, simply, “disqualifying.”

A Republican U.S. senator is vowing to seek out a “third option” if Trump is the Republican nominee. Conservative commentators are openly speculating about taking over another party for ballot purposes — the Constitution Party, for instance — to run a conservative as an alternative to Trump.

Yet, the Trump train rolls, likely through Super Tuesday and well beyond. His chief rivals are left blasting him for, among other things, his spray tan and the size of his hands — insults worthy of a race for class president, except they might get a student suspended.

It has party leaders perplexed and not amused.

“It shows that there’s not a cohesive party. It’s a group of disparate parts,” said Fred Malek, a Republican operative and fundraiser who has worked in high-level GOP circles for more than four decades. “The only way to win is to coalesce around a qualified and electable candidate.”

That window is closing, and fast. The GOP has no break-glass plan to block a candidate who gets enough delegates to be the nominee from winning the nomination.

How the party got here is a complicated question. It weaves through John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate; the GOP’s awkward embrace of the tea party movement that rose in reaction Obama presidency; the turn toward celebrity in politics that both parties have sought to channel; and the exquisite and flamboyant salesmanship of Trump, who has remade the rules of politics by running on themes voters are responding to in shocking numbers.

How the party gets from here is perhaps more complicated. Trump may still get blocked via the front door, though options for denying him a majority of delegates are limited, given the still-divided nature of his opposition.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to go third-party himself if the GOP establishment tries to steal the nomination from him. Whether it’s Trump or someone else going that route, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where that doesn’t result in the election of a Democrat to the White House — Hillary Clinton, most likely.

Vox on Bernie Sanders’ speech:

The senator gave his Vermont victory speech early in the night, before many of the results from the night’s primaries had come in.

Sanders, who was expected to win in his home state, hit all his crowd-raising campaign points Tuesday night, reminding his supporters that even if Super Tuesday does not go fully his way, the fight is far from over.

“Now, I know that Secretary Clinton and many of the establishment people think that I am looking and thinking too big – I don’t think so,” Sanders said. He said that close races would still favor him in terms of delegate counts.

“This is not a general election. It is not winner take all,” he reminded the crowd. “If you get 52 percent, you get 48 percent, you roughly end up with the same amount of delegates in a state. By the end of tonight, we are going to win many hundreds of delegates.”

“At the end of tonight, 15 states will have voted, 35 states remain. And let me assure you that we are going to take our fight for economic justice, for social justice, for environmental sanity, for a world of peace to everyone of those states.”

National Review:

It is a brutal truth that in any ordinary election cycle, Trump’s performance tonight would have placed him in such a commanding position that we would now see increasing calls for competitors to drop out and rally behind the presumptive nominee. It is a brutal truth (for Trump fans) that this is not an ordinary election cycle. Too many Republicans (myself included) are so committed to #NeverTrump that there will be no rallying. It is a brutal truth (for #NeverTrump conservatives) that Super Tuesday did not truly clarify the race. Both Rubio and Cruz did well enough that neither one will drop out, and it’s futile to start pressuring either Cruz or Rubio to leave the race — at least not yet. It is a brutal truth that John Kasich almost certainly cost Marco Rubio Virginia and saved Donald Trump from a serious setback. It is a brutal truth that so long as Trump runs against a fractured field, he almost certainly wins. Given all these brutal truths, the only hope is for Rubio and Cruz to continue to hammer Trump.

A cross-section of Tweets:

graphic via shutterstock.com

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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