New York: Donald Trump consolidated his lead in the 2016 Republican presidential race with Super Tuesday victories but failed to eclipse his rivals or draw reluctant party leaders into his corner.

The New York real estate tycoon proclaimed himself a ‘unifier’ on Tuesday night after he won seven states from centrist Massachusetts to the conservative Deep South.

That fell on deaf ears as his White House rivals were unbowed and the Republican establishment unwilling to accept him as their standard-bearer in the Nov. 8 race to replace Democratic President Barack Obama.

‘If this was anybody else as a front-runner, there’d be people right now saying ‘Let’s all rally around the front-runner,’’ said U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who won his first state contest, Minnesota, on Tuesday.

‘That will never happen with Donald Trump,’ Rubio, favorite of the Republican establishment, told Fox News on Wednesday. ‘On the contrary.’

The Super Tuesday wins cemented Trump’s front-runner status. The 69-year-old political newcomer went into the busiest day of the primary season with a hefty lead in national opinion polls and victories in three of the first four Republican contests.

His latest wins also compounded the problem for a party whose leaders are both critical of many of Trump’s positions and values and skeptical he can defeat the likely Democratic nominee in November, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While they have yet to coalesce around a single strategy, anti-Trump Republicans have begun taking action. Conservative advocacy group Club for Growth claimed credit for slowing Trump in some primary states by running attack ads.

Some party donors - including hedge-fund manager Paul Singer and Meg Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise chief executive - organized a phone call on Tuesday to get funding for an anti-Trump effort, the New York Times reported.