Big Southern wins help Clinton extend lead on Super Tuesday

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign rolled through the South on Tuesday in the biggest night of the primary season, an election sweep that significantly narrows Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ path to the Democratic nomination.

[...] 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 every one of those states.

[...] it wasn’t a coincidence that Sanders made his victory speech about a half hour after the polls closed on his 6-to-1 home-state win and before the results were released in a number of Clinton-friendly states.

“It looks like Clinton is really racking it up tonight,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst and professor at the University of Southern California.

Southern states, with plenty of pro-Clinton black Democrats, have always been considered her campaign’s firewall, protecting her from the unexpectedly tough challenge from Sanders.

CNN exit polls, for example, found Clinton winning 83 percent of the African American vote in Georgia and a startling 93 percent in Alabama.

Clinton went into Super Tuesday with a big lead in pledged delegates and ended the evening with an even wider margin, pulling big numbers in such delegate-rich states as Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia.

[...] the future looks even bleaker for Sanders and his insurgent band of progressives and young voters.

Since Democrats award their delegates on a proportional basis, that means the senator not only has to win more states than Clinton, but he also has to win them big.

[...] with Clinton holding double-digit leads in the polls of huge future primary states like California, New York, Florida and Ohio, it’s hard to see just where Sanders can get the victories he needs to keep Clinton from the nomination.

In her victory speech, Clinton stole some of Sanders’ most popular — and populist — applause lines, arguing that “this country belongs to all of us, not just those at the top,” and that “too many of those with the most wealth and the most power in this country today” have forgotten that workers and the middle class also count.

“It’s clear tonight that the stakes in this election have never been higher and the rhetoric we’re hearing on the other side has never been lower,” the former secretary of state said.