Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton traded victories in an epic struggle from Connecticut to California.
Democrats played out a historic struggle between Obama, seeking to become the first Black president and Clinton, hoping to become the first female to win the White House.
Obama won Connecticut, Georgia, Alabama, Delaware, Utah, Minnesota, North Dakota, Kansas and his home state of Illinois.
Clinton won at home in New York as well as in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas, where she was first lady for more than a decade.
After an early series of low-delegate, single-state contests, Super Tuesday was anything but small — its primaries and caucuses were spread across nearly half the country in the most wide-open presidential campaign in memory.
Polling place interviews with voters suggested subtle shifts in the political landscape, potentially significant as the races push on through the campaign calendar.
Overall, Senator Clinton was winning only a slight edge among women and White voters, groups that she had won handily in earlier contests, according to preliminary results from interviews with voters in 16 states leaving polling places. Senator Obama was collecting the overwhelming majority of votes cast by Blacks.
Clinton was gaining the votes of roughly six in 10 Hispanics, and she hoped the edge would serve her well as the race turned west to Arizona, New Mexico and California, the biggest prize with 370 delegates.
The allocation of delegates lagged the vote count by hours. That was particularly true for the Democrats, who divided theirs roughly in proportion to the popular vote. In other words just because you won a state doesn’t mean you won all the delegates; he delegates will be distributed out according to the number of votes you receive.
Overall, Clinton had 325 delegates to 259 for Obama, out of the 2,025 needed to secure victory at the party convention in Denver. Clinton's advantage is due to her lead among so-called superdelegates, members of Congress and other party leaders who are not selected in primaries and caucuses — and who are also free to change their minds.
Alabama and Georgia gave Obama three straight Southern triumphs. Like last month's win in South Carolina, they were powered by Black votes. However, Senator Obama was also leading in White votes by six percent. The big ticket is California with 370 Democratic delegates where it is close, but Clinton leads in the large Latino and Asian voter blocks.
Democrats and Republicans alike said the economy was their most important issue. Democrats said the war in Iraq ranked second and health care third. Republican primary voters said immigration was second most important after the economy, followed by the war in Iraq.
Both Obama and Clinton conceded in advance that neither was likely to emerge from the busiest day in primary history with anything more than a relatively narrow edge in convention delegates.
"Senator Clinton, I think, has to be the prohibitive favorite going in given her name recognition, but we've been steadily chipping away," said Obama.
Already, both campaigns were looking ahead to February. 9 contests in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington state and February 12 primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. And increasingly, it looked like the Democrats' historic race between a Black man and a woman would go into early spring, possibly longer.
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