The state’s Democratic and Republican establishments both faced potent threats Tuesday from political outsiders and their own parties’ grass-roots activists.
Democrats dodged the bullet. Republicans did not.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump cruised to an easy Massachusetts presidential primary victory Tuesday, while Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowly topped Bernie Sanders and stabilized her position as the party favorite.
Trump showed broad support across the state, racking up wins in Boston, the Berkshires, on Cape Cod, in Worcester County, and large swaths of Middlesex County.
Trump’s runaway win — he was just shy of 50 percent of the vote with 94 percent of the vote counted — served as a stinging rebuke to state GOP leadership, which has been critical of the billionaire.
Advertisement
Voters across the state turned out in high numbers to cast primary ballots, fueled perhaps by the unpredictable nature of the races in both parties.
Clinton carried Boston, part of her show of strength in urban areas and high-income suburbs. Sanders won huge swaths of the state in the lower-population central and western counties. With 94 percent of votes counted, Clinton held a lead of 51 to 48 percent.
“It’s a great victory in Boston tonight,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said after arriving at a Clinton party shortly before 10 p.m.
Walsh said unofficial numbers put Boston on track to break a primary turnout record and predicted that, once the votes were finalized, the city would probably furnish Clinton’s margin of victory.
At Sanders’ party in Somerville, campaign officials sought to frame the results as a part of a protracted fight for convention delegates.
Paul Feeney, the Vermont senator’s Massachusetts state director, said, “We wish we did a little bit better and we had a decisive victory. But we are going to try to figure out what it means for delegates and continue on to Maine. This has been a campaign for delegates. The senator said last week that this is going to be a slog for delegates.”
Advertisement
In a sign of the state’s importance in the Democratic race, both Clinton and Sanders held events in Massachusetts on Monday, and former President Bill Clinton spent much of the day here Tuesday.
The 42nd president stirred some controversy when he entered a West Roxbury polling place, in what some critics charged could have been a violation of state election law.
Hillary Clinton won the primary in Massachusetts over Barack Obama in 2008, despite many of the state’s leading Democrats, including Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Governor Deval Patrick, supporting the Illinois senator.
A Clinton victory here this year will probably be widely viewed as validation that she has overcome turbulence within the party, while a loss would have been perceived as a sign of lingering doubts among Democrats, many of whom have rallied to Sanders’ insurgent bid.
After trailing Clinton by 25 points in a November poll, Sanders rode an unabashedly liberal platform to broad appeal among grass-roots activists and younger voters here, echoing his rise nationally.
The unexpectedly strong candidacies of Trump and Sanders have rattled the state’s Republican and Democratic political establishments. Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, has made clear he does not support Trump, but has not gone as far as some nationally prominent Republicans who have said they would not support him as nominee.
Baker, who endorsed Chris Christie days before the New Jersey governor ended his presidential campaign, has been far more active in the state Republican committee races, working to wrest power from conservatives and gain more control of the state party apparatus.
Advertisement
In a sign of the GOP establishment’s dismay with Trump, state party chairwoman Kirsten Hughes released a statement congratulating “all of our Republican candidates,” but pointedly did not mention the night’s big winner.
A huge cheer went up at Trump’s Massachusetts headquarters in Littleton as Fox News projected that he had won the contest.
Debra Livernois, a 54-year-old property manager from Littleton, said she has been supporting Trump since the beginning of his campaign and changed her registration from Democrat to Republican so she could vote for him.
“I like his economic policies, his plan for taxes, for jobs, protecting the borders, stopping all the drug trafficking that’s coming in,” she said.
Ohio Governor John Kasich and Senator Marco Rubio were locked in a tight race for second place.
On the Democratic side, elected officials almost to a person backed Clinton over Sanders. But his late surge validated the grass-roots progressive movement’s efforts to make inroads despite opposition from party leadership, from Walsh to Senator Edward J. Markey to the entire House delegation and Attorney General Maura Healey. Senator Elizabeth Warren has remained a notable holdout.
After contests in the earliest-voting states, the race went national on Tuesday, with balloting in 12 different states. Massachusetts, historically little more than an afterthought in presidential elections, had been closely watched.
Advertisement
Among Democrats, Sanders’ progress here, from a distant second to Clinton last fall to Tuesday’s finish, was eyed as a key metric of his campaign’s durability — and of Clinton’s vulnerability to a test from the left.
Trump’s standing here was considered another piece in the juggernaut he has assembled in the GOP primary, or as a chance for more moderate Republicans to try to stop him.
His blowout win will probably help fuel the political prairie fire he has ignited across the country, overwhelming establishment Republicans who have tried a series of tactics to stop him.
Before the results were announced at the Trump party, Celeste Wilson, a Billerica resident, said one of the reasons for the surge of support for Trump was that “nobody can buy him.’’
Democrats claimed victory in three special elections for House seats, with Gerry Cassidy of Brockton, Tom Walsh of Peabody, and Stephan Hay of Fitchburg appearing to win seats.
Joshua Miller, Martin Finucane and Andy Rosen of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Jim O’Sullivan can be reached at jim.osullivan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JOSreports.