Obama, McCain projected to win Vt. primaries
NBC News projects 12th straight win in Democrat race for Illinois senator
BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and news services
updated 12 minutes ago
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois won the Vermont’s Democratic presidential primary Tuesday night, while Sen. John McCain of Arizona was the winner on the Republican side, according to projections by NBC News.
The state’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be apportioned later based on the size of Obama’s win over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. It was Obama’s 12th victory in a race in which the Illinois senator had the momentum and the lead in the delegate chase in NBC News’ count, 1,194-1,037, going into Tuesday’s balloting.
In all, there were 370 Democratic delegates at stake in Rhode Island, Vermont, Ohio and Texas, which uses an unusual primary-caucus system.
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The Republican contests are winner-take-all, and McCain’s victory netted him 17 delegates to the Republican National Convention, taking him to 947 delegates by NBC News’ count.
Crucial contests
Obama sounded a confident note Tuesday, saying that regardless of the nights outcome, he had a comfortable enough lead in delegates that Clinton would need blowout wins to get back in contention.
“You know, what my head tells me is that we’ve got a very sizable delegate lead that is going to be hard to overcome,” he said on a campaign flight Tuesday to San Antonio.
“You’ll recall that when we were winning those 11 races in a row, the theory was that they had to blow us out of Texas and Ohio, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Obama said Clinton’s more aggressive advertising in recent weeks had backfired on her by creating “turbulence” in the minds of voters.
“I mean, we were 20 points behind a couple weeks ago, you know,” he said. “Now we’re in a virtual dead heat. Just remember where we were and where we’ve been.”
Some of Clinton’s supporters — her husband, the former president, among them — agreed that she needed to outpoll Obama in both Texas and Ohio to sustain her candidacy.
Nevertheless, in appearances Tuesday, Clinton sounded as though she might continue her campaign if she only won Ohio.
“You don’t get to the White House as a Democrat without winning Ohio,” Clinton said in Houston.
“My husband didn’t get the nomination wrapped up until June [in 1992]. That has been the tradition,” she added, without mentioning that most primaries this year were held much earlier than in 1992. “This is a very close race.”
It takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination, and slightly more than 600 remained to be picked in the 10 states that vote after Tuesday.
The Democratic marathon was in contrast to a Republican race that was fierce while it lasted, but long since settled.
Going over the top?
McCain began the night with 930 delegates out of 1,191 needed for the nomination at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. There were 256 Republican delegates at stake in the four states on the night’s ballots.
McCain’s sole major remaining rival, former Arkansas Gov. Mike
It is McCain’s second run at the nomination, after his loss to George W. Bush in 2000. His campaign nearly imploded last summer, but he regrouped, reassuming the underdog role that he relishes, and he methodically dispatched one rival after another in a string of primaries in January and early February.
Focus shifts to NAFTA
Rhode Island and Vermont received little attention from either of the Democratic candidates, who devoted most of their time to Ohio and Texas. They debated once in each big state and stressed issues that varied from one to the other.
Trader — specifically, the North American Free Trade Agreement — was a focus in Ohio.
Obama sent out mass mailings that said Clinton had supported NAFTA when it was passed during her husband’s administration and that he had opposed it. She angrily accused him of distorting her record.
But roles were reversed in the campaign’s final hours after a memo surfaced in which a Canadian official described a meeting in which Obama’s senior economic adviser said Obama’s criticisms of the trade agreement were political positioning.
Clinton said Obama had given a “wink-wink” to Canada on the issue. “Nobody reached out to the Canadians to try to assure them of anything,” he said. |
