ADVERTISEMENT 2
ADVERTISEMENT 3
Error: No articles to display
ADVERTISEMENT 1
ADVERTISEMENT 4
Children categories
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are eyeing an opportunity to pull away from their rivals on Super Tuesday, a delegate-rich dash across the country that could accelerate their march toward the general election.
Voters from Vermont to Colorado, Alaska to American Samoa and a host of states in between were heading to polling places and caucus sites on the busiest day of the 2016 primaries.
The contests come at a turbulent moment for Republicans as they grapple with the prospect of Trump becoming the party's nominee. Rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are engaged in a frantic effort to stop the billionaire — with Rubio in particular lobbing surprisingly personal attacks — but it was unclear whether they'd made their move too late.
But Trump said Tuesday that Rubio should drop out of the race if he doesn't win any of the Super Tuesday contests.
"He has to get out," he told Fox News. "He hasn't won anything."
Like Trump, Clinton has won three of the four early voting contests, including a thrashing of rival Bernie Sanders in South Carolina on Saturday. Her victory there was due to overwhelming support from black voters, putting her in position for a strong showing in several Southern states with large African-American electorates that vote Tuesday.
Clinton has increasingly turned her attention to Trump in recent days, casting herself as a civil alternative to the insults and bullying that have consumed the Republican race.
"What we can't let happen is the scapegoating, the flaming, the finger pointing that is going on the Republican side," she told voters gathered in Springfield, Massachusetts. "It really undermines our fabric as a nation. So, I want to do everything I can in this campaign to set us on a different course."
Sanders, who has energized young voters with his call for a political revolution, was seeking to stay close to Clinton in the South and pick up victories in states including Minnesota and his home state of Vermont. But Sanders faces tough questions about whether he can rally minorities that are core Democratic voters.
After he voted Tuesday in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders told reporters that if voter turnout is high "we are going to do well. If not, we're probably going to be struggling."
Democrats will vote in 11 states and American Samoa on Tuesday, with 865 delegates up for grabs. Republicans will vote in 11 states, with 595 delegates at stake.
Trump was seeking to sweep the South, which would be a massive blow for Cruz. The Texas senator, a favorite of the region's social conservatives and evangelical Christians, expected the South to be his firewall, but now is simply hoping to emerge with a victory in his home state.
Rubio's goal on Super Tuesday is even more modest. He's seeking to stay competitive in the delegate count and hopes to pull off a win in his home state of Florida on March 15.
The Florida senator has cast himself as Republicans' best chance to win in a general election and has received a flood of endorsements from GOP officials after other more mainstream candidates dropped out. But he's failed to win a state so far, raising questions about his strategy for topping Trump.
Republicans spent months largely letting Trump go unchallenged, wrongly assuming that his populist appeal with voters would fizzle. Now party leaders are divided between those who pledge to fall in line behind Trump if he wins their party's nomination and others who insist they can never back him.
An Associated Press survey of GOP senators and governors across the country showed just under half of respondents would not commit to backing Trump if he's the nominee. Their reluctance foreshadowed a potentially extraordinary split in the party this fall.
"If he becomes the nominee the Democrats are going to savage him, no question about it," GOP Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch said. His Republican colleague from Arizona, Jeff Flake, said he was "still holding out hope" that he wouldn't have to make the choice about supporting Trump.
The worries among Republicans appeared to grow after Trump briefly refused to disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke during a television interview. Trump said he had not understood the interviewer who first raised the question about Duke, and he did later repudiate him.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said Tuesday he is trying to stay out of the "day-to-day ups and downs of the primary," nonetheless took time on the busiest voting day of the year to date to say anyone who wants to be the Republican presidential nominee must reject any racist group or individual.
"When I see something that runs counter to who we are as a party and a country I will speak up. So today I want to be very clear about something: If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry," Ryan said.
States holding voting contests in both parties Tuesday are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. Republicans vote in Alaska and Democrats in Colorado. Democrats also have a contest in American Samoa and for Democrats Abroad.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Sportscaster and TV host Erin Andrews testified on Tuesday that she doesn't think she'll ever get over the emotional fallout that came after a stalker secretly took nude videos of her and put them on the Internet.
The stalker was able to get the videos after altering hotel room door peepholes, removing them and placing his cell phone camera against the empty hole.
Andrews has filed a $75 million lawsuit against the stalker and the owner and manager of the Marriott at Vanderbilt. She blames the hotel companies after the stalker altered the peephole while she stayed in Nashville to cover college football for ESPN.
During testimony in the civil trial, Andrews said she remains on guard every time she stays in a hotel during her extensive business travels.
Andrews said she immediately asks to change rooms as soon as she checks into a hotel. She said she refuses to let anyone inside the room, and she sweeps it for cameras or "booby traps."
Andrews told jurors Monday that it ripped her apart when some said they thought the videos were a publicity stunt. She broke down, saying she's anxious and depressed, and gets taunted by people who've seen the videos.
The hotel companies say what happened is terrible but the stalker is to blame.
Jurors heard from the stalker earlier Monday during recorded depositions played in court. In the videos played before the jury, Michael David Barrett testified that he took the secret nude videos of Andrews so he could make money.
Barrett spent more than 2 1/2 years in federal prison after he admitted to renting hotel rooms next to Andrews three times and shooting nude videos of her in Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, and posting them on the Internet.
He was an executive with a Chicago-area insurance company when he shot the footage of Andrews in the Nashville hotel in September 2008.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama called Democrats and Republicans to the White House Tuesday to discuss election-year standoff over the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Neither side showed signs of budging.
In an awkward Oval Office sit-down that lasted less than an hour, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, delivered their case for refusing to consider any nominee to the highest court during the throes of a presidential election. Their Democratic counterparts, meanwhile, resolved to "continue beating the drum," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid told reporters after the meeting.
The gathering was the first time the leaders have met since Justice Antonin Scalia's death last month set off an election-year clash over the Supreme Court vacancy. While the men huddled at the White House, the Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump was ready to pick up momentum in several state primary contests Tuesday. Democrats were quick to tie the Republican leadership's stance to their party's front-runner.
"All we want them to do is fulfill their Constitutional duty and do their job, and at this stage, they decided not to do that," Reid said. "They think that they can wait and see what President Trump will do, I guess."
Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking Democrat on the committee also attended the meeting and posed for photos with smiles frozen to their faces.
When reporters got too close to Grassley, Biden joked, "Don't hurt Senator Grassley. We need him."
The leaders ignored a reporter's question about whether their minds were open to changing their position, as aides shooed reporters from the room.
At another time, the gathering might have been a nod to the tradition of at least limited cooperation in naming and confirming justices to the nation's highest court. The president might have floated potential candidates; Senate opposition might have come armed with their own preferred names.
But in the current standoff, gestures of collaboration seem moot. Neither side has indicated it will come with much more than talking points.
"Look, the president is open to a discussion, but it would represent a pretty dramatic reversal in position for Mr. McConnell, who has said that the president shouldn't put anybody forward, to come with a list of potential nominees," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday. "It makes it hard for him to engage constructively, until they change that position."
Before heading to the White House Tuesday morning, McConnell made clear he would not budge.
In remarks on the Senate floor, he said he planned to use the meeting to "reiterate that the American people will have a voice on the vacancy at the Supreme Court as they choose the next president."
He added that the White House might want to fill out the meeting agenda with other topics, such drug-abuse legislation.
McConnell also promised no movement when he addressed House Republicans at their weekly Tuesday morning meeting.
Several of those in attendance said he even used the phrase "Read my lips," made famous by President George H.W. Bush when he promised during his 1988 campaign to not raise taxes — a promise he later abandoned under Democratic pressure.
While the standoff continues, the president spent a significant part of the weekend reading through files on potential nominees and considering his options, Earnest said, adding that the president has not settled on a short list and could still add names to the mix.
For now, the White House is focused on demonstrating that it is making an effort to consult with the Senate — even if there's not much give and take.
In separate op-eds published in home-state media outlets on Tuesday, McConnell and Grassley both wrote that Biden, a former Senate Judiciary chairman, once endorsed the idea of suspending consideration of a nominee during an election year, presumably in an effort to keep the court from becoming overly politicized.
"The president certainly has the constitutional authority to nominate a justice in an election year, and he intends to use it," Grassley wrote in the Des Moines Register. "In the Senate, we have the equal constitutional authority to consent or withhold consent. This is not a new or even partisan idea."