Primary live: Trump and Clinton win big as Kasich takes Ohio and Rubio quits

A two-minute video guide to Tuesday’s results.

We’ve come to the end of another election night – and did we just come up with a general election contest?

Multiple campaigns and serial pundits might deny it. And in fact there remain slim chances that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton might not be our future presidential nominees. Trump appeared to have more significant obstacles than Clinton, with a difficult path to an outright delegate majority and influential members of his party actively working against him.

But with results in Missouri in both party’s races still too close to call, Clinton has won four out of four other states on the Democratic side, and Trump has won three out of four, dropping Ohio to home-state governor John Kasich.

Here’s a summary of where things stand:

• Hillary Clinton romped through the Democratic races, with a very large 31-point win in Florida supercharging her delegate lead.
• Donald Trump dropped Ohio to Kasich but won three of the other four contests, including Florida, where he picked up 99 delegates. He could end up with four wins out of five, with the Missouri result still unresolved.
• Florida senator Marco Rubio suspended his campaign after losing every county in his home state to Trump but Miami-Dade, where he lives.
• Texas senator Ted Cruz challenged Trump in Missouri in a race too close to call. He called it a two-man race for the nomination, pointing to his previous wins.
• Kasich said he would stay in the race through the national convention in July, asserting that Trump could not get to the 1,237 majority of delegates he needs to win outright – the idea being to precipitate a contested convention and fight it out.
• Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders held a large rally in Phoenix, Arizona, in which he did not mention the night’s results. But the Vermont senator later released a statement saying: “We remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination.”
• The demographics look good for Sanders in the next handful of races but not as good afterwards. Trump seems well positioned in north-eastern states due to vote soon – but could face difficulty in the Rockies and out West. Here’s a schedule of upcoming voting.
• The two races split a bit from here, with Democrats voting solo in five states in the next month. The next big voting is a week from now, in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.
• Here are the delegate counts as they stand:

Rubio did not take Cruz’s call tonight, Bloomberg reports:

Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report thinks that Trump voters’ apparent aversion to delegates with foreign-sounding names has cost the candidate delegates.

On Illinois ballots, delegates are listed by name with an indication of which candidate they support, and voters elect the delegates directly. (In other states voters simply vote for candidates by name and the party takes care of assigning delegates.)

Trump delegates Raja Sidiq and Nabi Fakroddin did not keep pace with other delegates pledged to Trump, such as Doug Hartmann and James Devors, Wasserman points out.

And it may have left Trump with two fewer chips in his delegates stack:

In a belated comment on tonight’s results, which he omitted from an hourlong speech tonight in Phoenix, Bernie Sanders congratulates Clinton, thanks supporters and says, “we remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination.”

Now Trump claims Missouri. Not so fast, Trump. We still have Missouri in the Too Close to Call column. At stake for the Missouri statewide victor are 12 bonus delegates.

Clinton’s speechwriter tweets a jubilant scene of Clinton staffers really having fun with classic rock and roll and dancing on this their night of exhilarating victory

Update from the spokeswoman. Feeling the Journey. Real exhilaration tonight in camp Clinton.

The Missouri cake isn’t quite baked, as far as we’re concerned. But NBC News has called it for Clinton – and Clinton takes it:

Clinton holds a lead of two-tenths of a percentage point in Missouri with 99.9% reporting.

That’s close!

And here’s an instant replay of Clinton winning Illinois:

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The Republican National Committee says tonight was “more bad news” for Clinton.

Four wins and maybe five, a 300-delegate lead, relief in Illinois and Ohio and a restored sense of equilibrium: the kind of bad news a campaign might wish for.

Clinton takes her fourth state, her birthplace, in a tight race. The Clinton campaign had prepared for a loss in the state on the strength of a strong Bernie Sanders attack on Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton ally. The Democrats award 182 delegates in the state on a proportional basis by congressional district.

Note: This post has been corrected in its description of Illinois’ rules for awarding Democratic delegates.

Of the three races still out, by far the biggest lead belongs to Hillary Clinton in Illinois, where she’s up 2 points with 92.6% reporting.

The Missouri races are both less than 1% apart.

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Some home-state love for governor Kasich.

There’s a concentration in the northeast among states hosting Republican contests from now through the end of April: Arizona, Utah, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Kasich is headed to Pennsylvania tomorrow, where there’s sparse polling – but he appears to be far behind Trump.

There’s winning only your home state (Kasich, so far) – and then there’s winning only your home town:

16 Mar 201623.47 EDT

Clinton claims 'very strong lead'

Lauren Gambino

After Clinton’s string of victories on Tuesday, her campaign said her lead would be “very hard to overtake” but stopped short of saying it was insurmountable. The campaign also refused to call on Sanders to exit the race, writes the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino:

“It is not up to us when the Democratic primary ends,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, told reporters after Clinton’s speech in Florida. “But we believe that it is a very strong lead, twice the size of any lead Senator Obama had as a candidate over then Senator Clinton.”

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Palmieri added: “When she ran against president Obama in 2008 she stayed in until the end. She said that she would never call on someone to drop out.”

But soon after Clinton’s speech ended, Correct the Record, a Super pac backing Clinton’s candidacy, said Tuesday’s victories “effectively ended the Democratic nomination for president” and taunted Sanders for staying in the race.

“If Sanders soldiers on, it will be for the same reason he made a politically calculating decision to run as a Democrat to begin with: to get media coverage for his own personal ambition,” said Brad Woodhouse, the Pac’s president.