Super Tuesday night turned out to be a chilly one in the Arizona desert.

But not chilly enough to stop hundreds of John McCain's supporters making their way up a long driveway of illuminated palm trees to the imposing Biltmore Hotel, where the presidential candidate hosted an almost-victorious election night party.

By the time Mr McCain took to the stage at 9.30pm, although the result from California had not yet been called, he had triumphed in New York, Arizona, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Illinois and Delaware.

The wins marked a truly remarkable turn-around in Mr McCain’s political fortunes, which many had thought were over when he burnt through $24 million of campaign money and almost went broke last July.

In the end, it was his refusal to back-down in his support of the troop surge in Iraq and his attempt to reform immigration that brought him back from the dead. The former decision was backed-up by success on the ground in Iraq, and the latter won him crucial Hispanic votes in Florida.

“Although I’ve never minded the role of the underdog, I think we have to get used to the idea that we are the Republican party frontrunners,” he told the crowd at the Biltmore, a Phoenix landmark that was opened in 1929 and once provided a bed to George W. Bush, along with 200 police officers and secret service agents.

The PA system in the hotel ballroom played military music before Mr McCain’s appearance, cutting to the theme from Rocky when he took to the stage along with his wife, Cindy, in pearls and a fire-engine red suit and his mother, Roberta.

The crowd cheered, but more in support than celebration. It had been a long day, but it wasn’t over yet.

Outside the ballroom, volunteers ate at a free buffet of grilled vegetables and olives and cheese while keeping track of CNN on plasma TV screens.

“Courageous Service, Experienced Leadership, Bold Solutions,” read the glossy flyers being handed out.

And yet a line on the back of the flier was perhaps an indication of why Mr McCain was still finding himself challenged by his rivals Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. “Independent Republican,” it said.

It is this independence that has alienated Mr McCain from the right of his party, with the conservative DJ Rush Limbaugh going as far as to say that a nomination of the war hero and Arizona Senator would tear apart the party. “It's going to change it forever, be the end of it,” he said. “A lot of people aren't going to vote. You watch.”

Even Mr McCain’s mother has acknowledged the problem with the right. “I think, holding their nose, they're going to have to take him,” she said last week.

At the Biltmore, the volunteers seemed more worried about who Mr McCain would run against from the other party than opposition within their own ranks.

“I think he’d have an easier time against Hillary than Obama," said Joanne Carpenter, a local Republican Committee volunteer.

Asked why, she said that it was Mrs Clinton’s husband, not the New York Senator herself, who was the liability. “No-one seems to like Slick Willy,” she said.

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