AP News Guide: Decision night, Super Tuesday

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump scored delegate-rich Super Tuesday victories across the nation as they bid for clearer sailing in a tempest-tossed campaign for the presidential nominations.

Voters in a dozen states put their imprint on the race, and in the bulk of contests rewarded the national front-runners, stretching their leads in delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

[...] Ted Cruz won Oklahoma as well as his home state, Texas, and Marco Rubio, the long-promising but underachieving mainstream hope of the Republican Party, won Minnesota for his first victory of the 2016 campaign.

Trump and his rebel yell against the status quo attracted nearly two-thirds of voters looking to install an outsider in the White House.

For all the endorsements, money and attention rallied behind Rubio as the GOP's only hope to stop Trump, he had yet to win a state before Tuesday and he remains short on time to stage a turnaround.

In six states (Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas), large majorities of Republican primary voters expressed support for temporarily banning all non-citizen Muslims from entering the U.S., a Trump proposal, according to early results of exit polls.

[...] Republican voters were more divided on another of his contentious ideas, to deport all people who are in the U.S. illegally.

The proposal won majority support only in Alabama, among seven states where that question was asked of GOP voters.

Immigration policy, the swollen U.S. debt, the uneven spread of wealth and hard questions about how to approach the Islamic State, terrorism and civil liberties are all in play for voters.

The biggest Super Tuesday state overall was Texas, where Cruz prevailed with his home-state advantage, prime endorsements from the governor down the political chain and a veritable army of some 27,000 volunteers.