“Super Tuesday” yielded a clear frontrunner on one side and a dead heat on the other. Two months ago, the Republican race was so convoluted that many predicted three or four candidates would split the delegates and the nomination would be decided by a brokered convention. Today, John McCain appears all but unstoppable in his quest for the GOP nomination. It is the Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who are essentially tied in a race that will take many more weeks to resolve.

McCain won all across the nation, while his chief competitor, Mitt Romney, underperformed. McCain swept the four winner-take-all-states in the Northeast. He won in the southern border states of Missouri and Oklahoma. He won by a wide margin in Illinois. And in California, the biggest state of all, McCain won 51 out of 53 congressional districts. (Romney won the other two.) The only region where McCain did not register a victory was the South—but even there he got good news, because Mike Huckabee won the four southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee), McCain finished second, and Romney finished third with only a handful of delegates.

Huckabee has become something of a stealth weapon against Romney. Supporters of the former Massachusetts governor rightly complain that Huckabee ruined their candidate’s strategy of winning Iowa and New Hampshire and then consolidating conservative support against a more moderate rival (either McCain or Rudy Giuliani). Huckabee was also a thorn in Romney’s side on Super Tuesday, so much so that the Romney campaign urged him to drop out so that conservatives could unite behind a single standard bearer.

Clinton’s ace may be her strength among Latinos. Exit polls showed her winning more than two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in California.

McCain does not fear Huckabee, who, outside the South, competes well only among evangelical Christians. Indeed, at yesterday’s West Virginia convention, the McCain forces maneuvered to secure a victory for Huckabee and a defeat for Romney. Romney won over 40 percent of the convention votes on the first ballot, while Huckabee received a third of the votes and McCain got only 15 percent. But McCain then asked his supporters to vote for Huckabee, which gave the former Arkansas governor the win (along with all 18 delegates) and shut Romney out.

Romney had a disastrous night. So far in the campaign, aside from his three home states—Massachusetts, Michigan, and Utah—he has only won in low turnout caucuses, but not in a single primary. Going forward, McCain will be almost impossible to catch.

On the Democratic side, Super Tuesday produced nearly a perfect tie. As I write, the precise delegate counts are still being calculated, but neither candidate is likely to have a victory margin of more than 20 delegates out of the 1500-plus delegates selected.

At one point during the evening, it looked as if Hillary Clinton had a slight edge. Her strong performance in California was better than expected. But Obama won in a number of smaller states—including Idaho and Utah, two of the reddest, most conservative states on the map—and he competed well in the Northeast, winning in Connecticut and coming close in New Jersey. He also eked out a win in Missouri. The South was split: the states with a relatively large black population, Georgia and Alabama, went for Obama, while the states with fewer African-American voters, Arkansas (Clinton’s former home state) and Tennessee, went for Clinton.

The Democratic race was balanced not only regionally, but also demographically. Each of the two candidates boasts a diverse coalition of supporters that can bring them close to a majority in most states. Obama appeals to younger, more independent, and more highly educated voters. He also relies on strong support from the black community and antiwar activists. Clinton does best among lower- and middle-income white voters, union members, women, older voters, voters most anxious about the economy, and Hispanics.

Her strength among Latinos may prove to be Clinton’s ace. Exit polls showed her winning more than two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in California. The Democratic race is likely to seesaw back and forth over the next few weeks. The primaries in the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland are fertile ground for Obama, since each of those electorates has a high concentration of African Americans plus loads of young and educated professionals. But March 4 will feature primaries in delegate-rich Ohio and Texas. In Ohio, the lower- and middle-income white trade unionists will probably favor Clinton. And if Texas Hispanics vote for Clinton by the same margin that California Hispanics did, she could secure a landslide victory in the nation’s second largest state.

But since the Democratic Party uses a proportional representation system to allocate its primary delegates, no candidate is likely to build a commanding lead quickly, and even the big March 4 primaries probably won’t settle things definitely. The good news for John McCain is that he will get a breather: over the coming months, he will have plenty of time to raise money and smooth relations with his party’s conservative wing. The bad news for McCain is that, during this period, Clinton and Obama will be in the media spotlight day after day.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.