Trump, Clinton poised to win East Coast primaries

Seeking to extend their dominance in the presidential race, front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton today put their bets on primaries in five delegate-rich East Coast states which could move them closer to earning their party's nomination for the November polls.
Trump, 69, and Clinton, 68, are poised to win the five-state primaries today, if the latest opinion polls are to be believed.
This would give Clinton and Trump - both New Yorkers - a clear edge over their primary rivals and move them several steps closer to earning the party's nomination for the November general elections, which would decide President Barack Obama's successor to the White House.

There are 172 Republican delegates at stake, and 384 up for grabs on the Democratic side in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.
However, even a clear cut win in all of these five states is unlikely to make either Clinton and Trump a presumptive nominee, which normally had been the case by now in previous presidential elections.
Trump, who has won 845 delegates so far, is still several hundred delegates short of the required 1,237 delegates. He is followed by Senator Ted Cruz from Texas with 559 delegates and Governor John Kasich with just 148 delegates.

The last two has no mathematical path to reach the 1,237 delegate count before the Republican Convention in Cleveland in July.

But a five-state sweep for Trumo with large margins of victory could put an effective end to the so-called 'Stop Trump Movement' that has been counting on some combination of Cruz and Kasich to block his march to the 1,237 delegate total.
The Cruz-Kasich alliance only came together, after Trump crushed the competition in New York.
On the other hand, Clinton has won 1,428 delegates in the primary elections so far and is closely followed by Senator Bernie Sanders with 1,153 delegates.
Clinton has a distinct edge over Bernie Sanders in terms of super delegates - who are party officials - and an overwhelming majority of them have pledged their support to her.

Addressing his supporters in Rhode Island, Trump lashed out at his two opponents Cruz and Kasich for forging a strategic alliance to defeat him.
"If you collude in business, or if you collude in the stock market, they put you in jail. But in politics, because it's a rigged system, because it's a corrupt enterprise, in politics you're allowed to collude," he said.
Cruz and Kasich appeared to have already conceded defeat in the five states, but said they hope to slow down Trump's momentum. While Cruz would focus in Indiana, Kasich would devote his entire resources in New Mexico and Oregon.