Kerry looks unstoppable for Super Tuesday vote

John Kerry's march to the Democratic presidential nomination has gathered further pace with easy wins in Tuesday's primaries and caucuses in Idaho, Utah and Hawaii - three states where he did not even bother to campaign.

The victories stretched the Massachusetts senator's lead in the number of delegates at the nominating convention in Boston in July. He now has 663 pledged delegates, more than three times as many as his one serious remaining rival, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. With his respectable second place in Hawaii, Dennis Kucinich, the liberal Ohio congressman, picked up six delegates, his first of the season.

The results, and the likelihood of another drubbing in next week's Super Tuesday round of primaries, leave Mr Edwards with a dwindling set of options. So far he has won just one contest - in South Carolina, the state where he was born - compared with Mr Kerry's 18 victories in the 20 states which have now voted.

Next week promises more of the same. Polls show the Massachusetts senator with leads of 30 points or more in the two biggest prizes on 2 March, California and New York. He is almost 20 points ahead of Mr Edwards in Ohio, a key swing state in the industrial Midwest where both men have campaigned hard in the past week.

Even more alarming for his opponent, Mr Kerry is also leading on Mr Edwards' home turf of Georgia, and is set to sweep Massachusetts and three other New England states next Tuesday. Some analysts say the North Carolina senator may be able to close the gap with a late surge, much as he did in Wisconsin 10 days ago. As there, his hopes largely depend on strong performances in televised debates between the candidates in California and New York, today and on Sunday respectively.

Otherwise, the game may well be up. More than half the 2,162 delegates required for nomination will be at stake on Tuesday, and Mr Edwards could be left with an unclosable gap, even with the primaries in the "mega-states" of Florida and Texas to come on 9 March.

Mr Edwards' last card is trade, as he seeks to portray Mr Kerry as a supporter of international agreements blamed for the loss of millions of Amercian jobs to low-wage economies abroad.

The trade and jobs issue has especially resonated in one-time "rust-belt" states such as Ohio and New York. But Mr Kerry has hit back by securing the backing of most trade unions. Speaking in Toledo, Ohio, yesterday, where he picked up an endorsement from the former astronaut and retired senator John Glenn, he lambasted companies which "ship our jobs overseas, or exploit the tax code to go to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes - and sticking the American people with the bill".

Although Mr Kerry frequently tells audiences that no president can stop companies from leaving the country, he said yesterday that he will require companies which ship jobs offshore to disclose their plans.