Americans began voting Tuesday in what is deemed the most pivotal day in the presidential nominating process, with frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hoping to wipe out their rivals, reports AFP. Voters in a dozen states will take part in "Super Tuesday" -- a series of primaries and caucuses in states ranging from Alaska to Virginia, with Virginia the first to open its polling stations at 6:00 am (1100 GMT). If Democrat Clinton and Republican Trump -- an outspoken billionaire political neophyte who has unexpectedly tapped into a vein of conservative rage at conventional politics -- win big, it could spell doom for their challengers. Hours before polls opened, the duo made last-ditch appeals to supporters ahead of a day like few others on the calendar leading up to the November election for the White House.
Trump's Republican rivals, Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, were frantically trying to halt the real estate magnate's march toward nomination, seeking to unite the party against the man they see as a non-conservative political interloper.
Clinton meanwhile was riding high after thrashing rival Bernie Sanders in South Carolina over the weekend, securing an astronomical 86 percent of the African-American vote in her third win in four contests. Should she win black voters by similar margins in places like Alabama, Georgia and Virginia, she should dominate there to become once again the inevitable candidate. That was her status at the start of the campaign -- before the rise of Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist. She was leaving nothing to chance, traveling to multiple states on Monday to urge a strong turnout. Clinton also took aim at the increasingly hostile campaign rhetoric on the Republican side led by Trump. "I really regret the language being used by Republicans. Scapegoating people, finger-pointing, blaming. That is not how we should behave toward one another,” she told hundreds gathered at a university in Fairfax, Virginia.