Republican voters have spoken yet again tonight, with five of the big states in the US casting their ballots.
Donald Trump has been confirmed as the winner in three of those states – Florida, Illinois and North Carolina – and holds a slight lead in Missouri (although he has been narrowly beaten in Ohio).
And one chart captures why he won tonight, why he has won the majority of the thirty states to vote so far, and why he will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.
By around two-to-one, Republican voters support Trump’s once-widely-ridiculed plan to introduce a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US, and at least half of these voters backed him today (with the other half split between multiple candidates).
In Florida – where he has beaten Marco Rubio, the one-time favourite for the Republican nomination as recently as five weeks ago – as many as three-in-five of the voters that support banning Muslims voted for him.
Among those who don’t support the policy, Rubio beat Trump handily.
But those voters only made up a fraction of Floridians. Most Republican primary voters in the state, and in the other four states that voted today, support Trump’s plan.
Rubio is in the wrong party. While the Florida senator was one of the most conservative candidates to run for the presidency in the modern era, his attitude towards Islam wasn’t stringent enough for his party’s supporters.
And that means Rubio won just two contests: Minnesota and Washington D.C, the same places Walter Mondale won when he was obliterated by Ronald Reagan in the 1984 general election (Rubio also won the ‘52nd state’ of Puerto Rico).
As Rubio said himself tonight, he has been on the wrong side of ‘a political tsunami’, a Trump-led tsunami which has rejected the rights of Mexicans, Muslims and most migrants to live, work and reside in the United States.
