Once again, Hillary Clinton pulled off a big win in a big state to keep her Presidential bid alive:
PHILADELPHIA, April 22 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Pennsylvania presidential primary decisively on Tuesday night, running up a 10-percentage-point victory that bolstered her case for staying in the race for the Democratic nomination.
Sen. Barack Obama played down a defeat that did not substantially reduce his delegate lead, but the outcome only further muddled a race that has stretched on for nearly four months and has sharply divided the party. The two will meet again in primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.
An estimated 2 million Democrats voted, nearly triple the number who turned out in the past two presidential primaries in the state. Clinton ran up big margins with her core constituencies, winning white voters with incomes under $50,000 by 32 points, voters over age 65 by 26 percent, and Catholic voters by 38 percent — more than countering Obama’s strong showing among black voters and higher-income whites in Philadelphia and its suburbs. She signaled that despite her dramatic financial disadvantage, she has no intention of getting out before the last votes are cast on June 3.
“It’s a long road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and it runs right through the heart of Pennsylvania,” Clinton said at a raucous post-election rally in Philadelphia. After a campaign that went on for more than a month and a half in the Keystone State, she said: “You listened, and today, you chose.”
“Some people counted me out and said to drop out. But the American people don’t quit, and they deserve a president who doesn’t quit, either,” she said.
Obama congratulated Clinton at a campaign event in Evansville, Ind., but also sought to move beyond a contest in Pennsylvania in which he heavily outspent her and became bogged down in a string of controversies, including reports about the incendiary comments of his former pastor and his own remarks about “bitter” small-town residents during a San Francisco fundraiser.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics — the bickering that none of us are immune to — and that trivializes the profound issues: two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril,” he said. “But that kind of politics is not why we’re here tonight. It’s not why I’m here and it’s not why you’re here.”
Yes, but it’s because of those “distractions” and that “silliness” that, once again, Barack Obama was unable to close the deal for the third time in this campaign. It happened in New Hampshire when Obama was unable to turn a victory in Iowa into what could have been an early knockout blow. It happened again in Texas and Ohio where he let a chance for a final victory slip away. And, it’s happened again in Pennsylvania.
And, as the exit polls show, Clinton won by appealing to the same voters that helped her in those three states:
Obama racked up margins of more than 90 percent among Pennsylvania’s black voters, who are heavily concentrated around Philadelphia. African-Americans made up about 14 percent of Tuesday’s vote, and whites made up about 80 percent — and voted 60-40 for Clinton.
The last week of campaigning included a bruising debate between Obama and Clinton, who also pounded her rival for a recent remark that decades of economic decline had left some rural voters “bitter” and clinging to religion and guns. CNN exit polls showed that nearly a quarter of state voters made their decisions in the past week, and those voters leaned toward Clinton by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent
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Weekly churchgoers made up almost 36 percent of Tuesday’s electorate, and they went to Clinton by a 56-44 margin. More than a third of the voters were gun owners, and they preferred Clinton by a similar margin: 60 percent to 40 percent, the polls found.
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Pennsylvania has high percentages of some core Clinton constituencies: Catholics, voters over 60 and blue-collar workers. She led strongly in all those categories, according to exit polls, and Obama led strongly among voters 18-29.
At the same time, though, six weeks of brutal campaigning focused on one state has left it’s mark:
[T]he contest appears to have left a bad taste in the mouth of many voters: Eleven percent of those voting in the Democratic race said they would vote for McCain over Clinton. Another 6 percent said they would stay home in a race between McCain and Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady.
Ten percent of Democrats said they would sit on their hands in a McCain-Obama race, and 15 percent said they would vote for McCain over the Illinois senator.
Get ready Indiana, you’re next.
