Super Tuesday Review: How Clinton, Trump Won Massachusetts

BOSTON, MA - Democrat Hillary Clinton scored much-needed points by needling rival Bernie Sanders' traditional weak spots in Massachusetts, while Donald Trump led Republican rivals this Super Tuesday on, well, just about every front.

The state was one of seven victories apiece for the two candidates now squarely positioned as front-runner in their respective parties.

A narrow, virtually unnavigable path to the nomination remains for rivals like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on the right or Vermont Sen. Sanders on the left, but the fact remains that no candidate in history has won the early primaries by these margins and failed to take the party nomination.

Here's how Trump dominated and Clinton squeezed by, here in the Bay State.

The Donald

According to exit polls from ABC, a record half of GOP Super Tuesday voters in Massachusetts were independents. Reports of some 20,000 Democrats switching their party to unenrolled or Republican surfaced early in the day Tuesday, and that block of voters appears to have helped assure Trump a truly massive margin of victory.

• See full Massachusetts' Republican primary results here

For context: his nearly 30-point margin of victory surpasses former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's 2008 primary win. More telling is the sheer number of participants in this year's GOP polls. Some 609,000 and counting cast their votes using a Republican ballot here this Super Tuesday. In the 2012 Massachusetts primary, that total was 370,425, and 2008 saw 497,531. Trump alone has received nearly 300,000 votes so far.

Exit polls show he won across-the-board on the issues, with particular support on immigration, where Trump has taken a tough and arguably unenactable stance that includes building a paid-for-by-Mexico wall along America's southern border.

As in other states, Trump landed a majority of Republican voters who described themselves as angry in the ABC exit poll, as well as those without a college education and voters who sought an anti-establishment candidate.

Clinton capitalizes on strengths

Independents and young voters flocked to Sanders in Massachusetts, but not in high enough numbers to edge out a win. Clinton won among what ABC News' exit polls identified as mainline Democrats, the sort that populate cities like high-turnout Boston, which she won by 20,000 votes and counting.

• See Massachusetts' full Democratic primary results here

Voters between ages 18 and 34 predictably gravitated toward Sanders' "political revolution" camp, but made up less than 20 percent of total voters, according to ABC's exit polls. As in other states, Clinton made up the difference with high margins among older voters, non-white constituents and among women, who filled nearly 60 percent of the Democrats' voting rolls, according to ABC.

In a state originally projected as a Sanders win, the race was relatively tight. Compare the standing 2.5-point margin between Sanders and Clinton to her nearly 6-point win over then-senator Barack Obama in 2008.

» Photos by Gage Skidmore via Flickr / Creative Commons