Clinton and Obama Trade Victories

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Clinton and Obama Celebrate Feb. 5 Victories

Americans in 24 states went to the polls on Feb. 5 to cast ballots in the largest ever "Super Tuesday" election. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the two Democratic frontrunners, cast votes in their home states and then awaited the results. Both candidates scored important victories.

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Though the Clinton team immediately hailed Massachusetts as an upset, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in an interview just after the race was called that he was "not surprised at all" by her win in the state. Clinton won the Bay State largely on the strength of her support from women, who made up more than half the electorate from coast to coast.

Exit polls from the National Election Pool showed Clinton with a double-digit lead among women in the state, where she attended college as an undergraduate. She also won among self-identified independents, normally a solid constituency for Obama.

"We feel quite good about how those returns have come in," Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Clinton, said in a conference call with reporters shortly after 10 p.m. As he spoke, cheers erupted in the background at the campaign's headquarters in Arlington.

Penn argued that people who made up their minds late were trending toward Clinton, though early exit data suggested there was an even split between the two.

In a race that will come down to delegates, Clinton officials said they will wait to see results from all the states before declaring a delegate count -- but predicted she would ultimately be ahead.

"By the end of today, with pledged delegates and superdelegates, we expect to be ahead of Senator Obama in overall delegates," said Guy Cecil, Clinton's field director.

In the South, Clinton more than held her own. She lost Georgia -- one of only a few states where she lost among women; the same was true in Illinois -- but triumphed in Arkansas, her former home state, and Oklahoma and Tennessee. And the race continued to split along racial lines, as Obama won about eight in 10 African Americans, a trend that put him over the top in Georgia and Alabama.

Still, he won nearly four in 10 white voters in Georgia and fared better among white men there than he had in an earlier racially polarized race in South Carolina, giving his campaign a chance to claim that he had broadened his support in the intervening weeks. Victories in Connecticut and North Dakota bolstered that claim.

The race in Missouri remained close even as other states were called; an early tally in Clinton's favor proved premature as the night wore on. But the state reflected a wider sweep for Obama among African Americans: He won more than three-fourths of the state's black voters, while Clinton beat him among senior citizens by a margin of 2 to 1.

The demographics of the Democratic race suggested a contest that is dividing along racial and gender lines, as Clinton won 7 in 10 white women in New Jersey, as well as three-quarters of Hispanic women.

The candidates divided men in New Jersey evenly. In Tennessee, Clinton won white voters of all ages; Obama won blacks across the board. Similar splits occurred in California, where black voters chose Obama 5 to 1. But the two split the white vote in California, where Clinton made up the difference by winning Hispanics 2 to 1.

Twenty-two states held Democratic contests yesterday, with 1,681 pledged delegates to the party's national convention in Denver at stake. The 22 states account for 52 percent of all pledged delegates awarded during the nomination battle.