Even as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz escalate their attacks on Donald Trump, next week’s cascade of Super Tuesday contests offers the GOP front-runner a unique opportunity to simultaneously weaken, and perhaps disable, his principal competitors on separate battlefields of a two-front war.
On one side, Trump could deal a crushing blow to Cruz, the Texas senator, across a series of Southern and Border States, from Alabama and Arkansas to Tennessee and Oklahoma, that are dominated by evangelical and blue-collar voters.
On the other front, polls show Trump leading in mostly white-collar, far less evangelical states including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia that should be crucial building blocks for Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich, the candidates relying most on mainstream conservative voters.
Trump’s strength in states that represent such divergent poles of the GOP coalition testifies to his unique assets as a candidate—and the challenge he presents for his rivals. If Trump can beat Cruz next week in heavily blue-collar and evangelical states on one side, and top Kasich and Rubio in white collar, less culturally conservative states on the other, it will grow increasingly daunting for any candidate to coalesce a coalition large enough to stop the front-runner.
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