On a Mission to Translate Belief Into Reality

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The Candidates React-- Obama

Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) addresses his supporters after the Super Tuesday primary election results filter in.

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In Boise, Debbi Taylor, a 50-year-old court clerk, said she drove six hours through bad weather from Ogden, Utah, to see Obama. "When my kids are excited and vote early and e-mail me to tell me about it, that's change in the world. That's something," she said.

In Minneapolis, Kevin Worden, a Habitat for Humanity director, gawked at the sight of the city's basketball arena packed to the rafters. "It's a snowball running down a steep hill and picking up all along," he said.

And in St. Louis, some of the 20,000 who attended a rally at the city's domed football stadium marveled that the event had drawn far more people than the city's popular Mardi Gras celebration the same night.

"Look at these numbers!" Helen Douglas-Taylor, a teacher, exclaimed. "We're just ready as a nation for something fresh, and he's fresh."

Exit polls drew a portrait of the voters who did not necessarily feel the same way, and showed that they mirrored the patterns in Obama's New Hampshire and Nevada defeats, despite the campaign's concerted attempts to overcome them.

He trailed by wide margins among women in the states he lost, despite attempts to feature women in his ads, campaign appearances with prominent women endorsers, and a high-profile rally in Los Angeles with Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver.

He trailed among Latino voters, despite a last-minute effort to educate them about his past advocacy for Hispanic causes, aided by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), whose family remains popular in the Hispanic community. And he trailed among working-class voters, despite a greater emphasis in his stump speech and ads on his economic proposals and his modest upbringing.

Meanwhile, he fared better than Clinton with men, African Americans, higher-income voters and independents.

Here and there last week, amid all the applause, there were supporters who recognized the downside of this profile in primaries where women and rank-and-file Democrats dominated, and where Latinos would play a crucial role.

In New Mexico, Pete Sheehey, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that when he canvassed for Obama, he found many non-Democrat supporters who could not vote for Obama under the state's primary rules. "It's frustrating: So many independents and Republicans say, 'I would vote for him if I could.' "

Some headway was made in the target groups. In Wilmington, Debbie Demeter, a teacher, came to see Obama because she was undecided. "He's a very elegant speaker and a sign of hope and change for the future. He's young and can bring forth some new ideas," she said. "But it's going to be hard, because I'd love to see the first woman president."

After the rally, she said Obama had wowed her and won her over. But she was just one voter, one of the relatively few, in the mad 10-day rush, who saw the candidate and his movement up close.