In the Democratic race, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won four of the five states in play on Tuesday: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) won the primary in Rhode Island.
In both parties, those results extended the front-runner’s advantage in convention delegates.
Clinton appeared to have added 170 delegates to her lead over Sanders: By the Associated Press’s count, Clinton now has 88 percent of the delegates she needs to clinch the Democratic nomination.
In the GOP, Trump exceeded the already-high expectations for Tuesday. As of 10:55 p.m., the AP projected that Trump won at least 105 delegates, compared with just five for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and one for Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
But the importance of Tuesday’s wins went beyond those numbers. For both Clinton and Trump, they showed that a long, drawn-out primary fight might be close to an end, and that stubborn adversaries seemed to be running out of time.
In the Republican race, Trump appeared to be trouncing his rivals by huge margins, winning by 30 percentage points or more in the first returns. Wins on that scale will make it harder for Cruz and Kasich to argue that Trump is a weak and divisive front-runner.