Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Have a Big Night

Hillary Clinton continued her winning ways tonight as she won key primary victories in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Illinois. Missouri had not yet been called at 1 am EDT but Hillary was holding a slim lead of about 1,000 votes with 99% of the votes counted.

While the final delegate counts will not available until tomorrow, Hillary’s landslide wins in the delegate-rich states of Florida and North Carolina will further lengthen her lead over Bernie Sanders, making it virtually impossible for Sanders to catch up as more than half of the primaries have now been decided.

On the GOP side, Donald Trump had a good evening, marred only by a loss in Ohio to Gov. John Kasich. Marco Rubio lost his home state of Florida by a large margin and announced an end to his campaign. While Gov. Kasich won his home state, he has no path forward to win the nomination outright and his only play is to push for a brokered convention and hope that in the chaos that ensues things will go his way.

Here is how each state played out:

Florida: Hillary was ahead all evening in this delegate-rich state and won the state by a huge margin of 65% to 33% for Sanders. Trump won with an impressive margin of 46% to 27% for Rubio and 17% for Cruz. For the GOP, Florida was a winner-take-all state. Rubio dropped out of the race in the face of the overwhelming rejection by his home state voters.

Ohio: Ohio was the other big state in play tonight and was another big win for Hilary Clinton as she won going away by a margin of 57 % to 43%. Sanders had made a major effort in Ohio and hoped to duplicate his victory in Michigan, but failed. On the GOP side, Ohio was a must-win state for John Kasich if his campaign was to stay alive and he won over Trump by a margin of 47% to 36%.

North Carolina: Trump led the GOP field by winning 41% of the vote, with Ted Cruz coming in second with 37% of the vote. Hillary led all evening and easily won the evening with 55% of the vote compared to 41% for Sanders.

Illinois: Hillary won a narrow and important victory in her birth state of Illinois by a margin of 50% to 49%. Trump won by 8 points and showed that the GOP voters were not impressed by the protesters last weekend that caused the cancellation of a Trump rally in Chicago.

Missouri: The Show Me state was a tight battleground for both Parties Tuesday night. With 99% of the GOP votes counted Trump was holding onto a narrow lead over Ted Cruz by a margin of 40.9% to 40.7%, a difference of fewer than 2,000 votes. On the Democratic side, the race was even tighter. With 99% of the votes counted Hillary had 49.6% to 49.4% lead over Sanders, a winning margin of some 1,500 votes.

Assuming that the current numbers hold, Hillary will have won an additional 326 delegates this evening giving her 1,094 delegates, while Bernie Sanders picked up 220 delegates giving him 774 delegates.  On the GOP side, Donald Trump will likely pick up an additional 152 delegates this evening giving him 621 while Ted Cruz looks to pick up 26 delegates for a total of 395. These numbers may change slightly when the results are declared official.

Cutting through the numbers, the bottom line of the evening is that frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had a good night. While Trump would have loved to have had a win in Ohio, the home state win by Kasich does nothing to slow his momentum. Outside of Ohio, voters did not show any great love for Kasich as he came in behind Trump and Cruz in the other four states.

Hillary bounced back from last week’s lost in Michigan with a key victory in Ohio. Assuming she wins Missouri it will be a great evening for her and cements her lock on the Democratic nomination.  The sooner Sanders can accept that his dream is at a dead end, the better for all Democrats.