Trump, Rubio and Cruz emerge from S.C. as the Republican leaders

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday that he doesn’t think last week’s spat with Pope Francis helped or hurt him in the SC primary.

“We won decisively when we had the leading players behind us”, Cruz said. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida locked in a battle for second place.

Bush went on to finish sixth in the Iowa caucuses, but barely squeezed ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire for a fourth place finish.

Donald Trump won the SC primary with one-third of the total vote. But he failed to connect with voters.

The Republicans lost a big name in the race: Bush suspended his campaign, making some question if Trump is now the definite front-runner for the GOP.

Sen Sanders remained upbeat, telling supporters after he conceded to Mrs Clinton in Nevada, “five weeks ago, we were 25 points behind in the polls”.

Rubio, who finished second in SC by a razor-thin margin over Cruz, pronounced it a “three-person race”, and the Florida senator predicted traditional Republicans would rally around him in the face of challenges by anti-establishment “outsider” candidates Trump and Cruz. She knew Nevada a lot better than we did – she had the names of a lot of her supporters. It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious, it’s lovely. Among South Carolina’s non-evangelical voters, Trump and Rubio raked in 30 and 22 percent of votes, respectively, while Cruz won over just 13 percent of the group.

“Donald Trump has proven to be a formidable candidate, but one of the things the first three states have shown is: There is only one campaign that has beaten or can beat Donald Trump”, Cruz told ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning.

Marco Rubio’s cheerleaders expect Bush’s exit to bring their candidate some big donations and endorsements – but what he needs is votes. “We think he’s had success with everything he’s touched”, Lynn Derrick, a first-time primary voter, told AFP in the state capital Columbia. Many states will hold primaries on March 1, a day known as Super Tuesday. “Thank you”, Clinton tweeted after the race was called.

The prospect of Mr Trump as the Republican standard-bearer, however, may be too much for some in the party to stomach.

He looked beyond SC to March 1st when about a dozen states pick nominees for each of the parties. “You have to have a true conservative” to win.

“I think we have a good shot in Colorado, a good shot in Minnesota, a good shot in MA”, he said on NBC.