Saturday Clean Sweep for Obama
Feb. 10, 2008— -- Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swept Saturday night's Democratic presidential nomination contests, earning key delegates in a neck-and-neck race with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton that may not be decided until the party's convention this summer.
Obama won the Washington state and Nebraska Democratic caucuses, and the Louisiana primary.
"Today, voters from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast to the heart of America stood up to say, 'Yes, we can,'" Obama said at a Virginia political dinner Saturday night. "We won in Louisiana, we won in Nebraska, and we won Washington state -- and we won north, we won south and we won in between. And I believe that we can win in Virginia on Tuesday if you're ready to stand for change."
Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee were locked in a close battle in Louisiana, which Huckabee later won. Huckabee also won in Kansas, while McCain took a tight race in Washington state, where Huckabee said he was not ready to admit defeat.
"We're looking at some legal issues. We're not ready to concede that one," Huckabee said, without going into specifics, according to The Associated Press.
While Super Tuesday voting may have cleared McCain's path to the GOP nomination, it also exposed just how close the race is between Obama and Clinton, who entered Saturday's four Democratic contests separated by less than 100 delegates, according to ABC News' Delegate Tracker.
A total of 158 Democratic delegates were at stake on Saturday between the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska, Washington and the Virgin Islands.
Obama won by large margins in the Saturday races. In the Nebraska caucuses, with 99 percent of precincts reporting, he held a 68-32 percent advantage. The margin was similar in the Washington state caucuses, with Obama claiming 68 percent of the vote with 94 percent of the precincts reporting. The race was a bit closer in the Louisiana primary, where Obama was the projected winner with 53-39 percent of the vote with 74 percent of precincts reporting. Obama also claimed the Virgin Islands caucuses.
The winner of the Democratic party, who will make history as either the first black or first female presidential candidate from a major party, will need 2,025 delegates to claim the nomination at the party's convention in Denver this August.
Obama was expected to do well in Saturday's caucuses in Washington, where the Illinois senator spent a significant amount of time this week and picked up the support of the Seattle mayor and state governor. Clinton, however, also had visited the Pacific Northwest this week and had support from both of Washington's U.S. senators, who will serve as superdelegates at the Democratic national convention.
Clinton actually may have performed better than expected in Louisiana, winning the majority of white voters in the primary. She could not, however, overcome the black vote. In Louisiana, according to ABC News analysis of exit polls, four in 10 voters are black, and black voters supported Obama 4-1 over Clinton.
Young voters, who typically have favored Obama, were in short supply, with under-30s accounting for just under one in 10 voters, a low proportion in the 2008 Democratic primaries to date. Nearly a quarter of voters, by contrast, are 65 and older.
The top issue in Louisiana, as it has been elsewhere, was the economy. Nearly half of Democrats called it the single most important issue in their vote; about three in 10 said it was the war in Iraq; about a quarter, health care.
Earlier Saturday, Huckabee won the Kansas Republican caucuses.
Huckabee may have drawn first blood in the series of post-Super Tuesday contests, but McCain remains the formidable frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
"I didn't major in math," Huckabee told a conservative conference in Washington on Saturday. "I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too."
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