Several news organizations are now calling the Pennsylvania primary: and it’s a win for Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton over rival Senator Barack Obama. The question now: how big will the win be and will it be a big enough win to impress Superdelegates?
Sen. Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary vote as expected, ABC News has projected.
Clinton has led polls in the state, and her win now fuels questions about why Obama hasn’t been able to sew up the nomination, despite having more money, having won more states and having a lead in the popular vote and pledged delegates, according to ABC News’ delegate scorecard.
The pressure was on Clinton today to win by a large margin.
“Hillary Clinton needs a clear and convincing victory today in Pennsylvania if she wants to continue on in this nominating process,” Democratic strategist Tad Devine told ABC News this morning.
What will be most important tonight will be:
(1) the final vote tally, (2) the number of delegates and (3) the demographic breakdowns. Did Clinton lose key constituencies that the Democrats can’t afford to lose? Did Obama? Is the picture emerging of an increasingly-fractured Democratic Party?
Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, FOX News projects, riding to victory with the aid of her core constituencies.
Barack Obama and Clinton, though, are carefully watching their margins to gauge success in the Keystone State. Pre-election surveys showed Clinton leading for weeks in Pennsylvania, but her margin will be critical in shaping how her flagging campaign is viewed going into the remaining nine primaries and caucuses.
With just 3 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton had 55 percent and Obama had 45 percent.
Exit polls showed Clinton hanging on to key voting blocs — women, seniors, whites, union members and lower-income households. The polls showed she was leading in union households by 58 to 42 percent, and among voters making less than $50,000-a-year by 55 to 45 percent.
But Obama was holding a commanding lead among black and young voters, as well as among college-educated voters, who exit polls showed were breaking for Obama by a margin of 54 to 46 points. Among urban voters, he was getting 69 percent of them compared with 31 percent for Clinton.
But the final outcome may be closer than Clinton had hoped.
“Right now there is real concern inside the Clinton camp that this will be a lot closer than they wanted,” reports CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod.
CBS News early exit polls show that most Pennsylvania Democrats made up their minds a long time ago, while only 23 percent decided within the last week.
Clinton, independent analysts and the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois had predicted ahead of time that Clinton would win the state, where she enjoyed large leads in opinion polls until recently. But after closing the deficit in the last few weeks, Obama’s advisers said he would have the momentum unless Clinton won by a sizable margin.
Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s chief spokesman, maintained that the size of any Clinton victory was immaterial. Targeting his pitch to the Democratic officeholders and other superdelegates who hold the balance of power at the party convention in Denver in August, he said a win was a win.
….But NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell quoted senior Clinton advisers as saying their analysis of interviews with voters as they left the polls indicated that Clinton would not get a big victory. The atmosphere was tense inside the campaign because it appeared Clinton would not get a boost of momentum from the night’s returns, Mitchell reported.
The senior advisers said that coupled with the campaign’s serious financial problems — the latest Democratic filings with the Federal Election Commission showed that Clinton was running in the red, while Obama had $42 million in cash on hand — the results meant they would have to work to find a new rationale for Clinton’s remaining in the race, Mitchell reported.
Obama scored big with new Democrats in Pennsylvania, early exit polls show.
One out of every seven Democratic party voters was not registered as a Democrat at the beginning of the year, and 60 percent of them cast their ballot for Obama, according to the exit polls.
Clinton fared better with voters who made up their mind in the last week, the exit polls showed.
Fifty-eight percent of those voters said they chose the New York senator. That includes voters who made up their mind in the aftermath of last week’s heated Democratic debate. See the exit polls
African-American voters in Pennsylvania supported Obama by a substantial margin. According to exit polls, 92 percent cast their vote for the Illinois senator, compared to 8 percent for Clinton.
The bottom line is: Hillary Clinton’s campaign — which would likely have gone on no matter what the victory margin — will continue. If she had lost, there would have been massive calls for her to drop out, perhaps even from some supporters. But it will continue…raising the stakes in North Carolina and, in particular, Indiana.
Now the lingering question is her victory margin. Double digits: more momentum. Single digits: a win but expect to see some more superdelegates go for Obama.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.