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For Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and surviving Republicans, close combat in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is just a memory, as they launch week-long campaign blitzes.
Territory on offer ranges from liberal bastions like Massachusetts in the north to the deeply conservative southern states of Alabama and Georgia.
Also in play are voters from frozen state of Alaska to Arizona's parched deserts, along with anything-goes California on the US left coast.
Harried campaign chiefs face unprecedented challenges: multi-million dollar nationwide ad blitzes will drain campaign war chests and gruelling plane trips will keep candidates' nerves taut.
The blizzard of contests long had been seen as the day when Republican and Democratic nominations would be decided, but the races are so tight that coronations are unlikely.
On the Democratic side, 1,700 convention delegates will be doled out: a total of 2,025 are needed for the nomination.
Mrs Clinton and Senator Obama are waging a tense contest, with former senator John Edwards hoping to pick up enough delegates to be kingmaker in the event of a deadlocked convention.
Republicans
Republicans are competing for more than 1,000 of the 1,191 delegates needed for the nomination.
Should Rudolph Giuliani not win Tuesday's Florida primary, the race will likely boil down to a two-man bout between Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
'No one has tried to do this before. We are all in uncharted territory,' Mrs Clinton said in Memphis, Tennessee Sunday.
Among Democrats, the 'Super Tuesday' map appears to offer the former first lady a slim advantage over Obama, with whom she has split the first four contests.
She has a steady double-digit lead in polls in California, which has most delegates - 370 - up for grabs for the national nominating convention.
New York, her home Senate patch, is the second biggest prize with 280 delegates. New Jersey is just next door, and another key prize, Arkansas, is where husband ex-president Bill Clinton was governor.
Latest RealClearPolitics poll averages show Mrs Clinton ahead in New York and New Jersey by 22 per cent and 18 per cent respectively, and she heads national polls by 9.4 per cent.
Senator Obama, despite a landslide in Saturday's South Carolina primary, is downplaying expectations.
'The Clinton operation is a tough, well-honed political machine built up over the course of 20 years,' he said.
'We have always been the underdogs in this campaign; we have always been the outsiders, the insurgent campaign.'
Even so, Senator Obama's camp is confident it will be in the driving seat by late on Super Tuesday.
'We believe it is unlikely that this race will be decided on Feb 5,' said campaign manager David Plouffe in a memo, but forecast a rough split of delegates would help Senator Obama beat Mrs Clinton in a race to the tape.
Senator Obama has another disadvantage on Feb 5 - his triumphs in Iowa and South Carolina were partly fuelled by electric public appearances, and followers fired up by soaring speeches.
But now he has only eight days to cast his spell countrywide, and his magnetism may be diluted by television, where much of the campaign will be fought.
Had delegates in Mrs Clinton's powerbase states been doled out on a winner-take-all basis, the race may have been hers by next week.
But, under a labyrinthine Democratic system of partial proportional representation, candidates can gather small hauls of delegates even in states unfavourable to them.
Super Tuesday poses harsh questions for Republicans, struggling to finance campaigns from a core powerbase unimpessed with their choices, but their map is much simpler, with most states winner-take-all.
Senator Obama is hoping to dominate in states like Alabama and Georgia with large black populations and has built a grass-roots movement, firing up students, independents and first-time voters.
Mrs Clinton hopes to gain an edge by driving women to the polls, and is popular among white-collar workers and the exploding Hispanic population - especially in California. -- AFP
