Barack Obama Wins Big in South Carolina
Bill Clinton’s Negative Campaign Attacks Hurt Hillary; 60% of voters who said in exit polls that Bill’s remarks were important to them, voted for Barack!
Barack Obama’s win in South Carolina does many things. It returns momentum to his campaign. It proves that Democrats are tired of negative attacks and; yes, it suggests that race is still important in American politics. With 55% of the vote Barack Obama captured the first decisive win in a presidential campaign that has been marked by many candidates and small pluralities of both Republican and Democratic candidates.
But perhaps the most important part for Democrats is that minority voters and younger voters were united by the Obama campaign. With demographics in America swinging rapidly, this has a huge implication for the long term future of both political parties.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama took 55 percent of the vote to win the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary on Saturday — his second victory among the party’s five voting events so far, and the most decisive primary win by any candidate in either party to date.
Obama defeated New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had 27 percent, and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and a native of South Carolina who had won the state’s primary by a wide margin in his bid for the 2004 presidential nomination.
African-Americans in South Carolina make up the largest share of the population and the Democratic primary electorate of any state that has voted so far in the nominating process. And the outcome indicated that Obama, who is seeking to become the nation’s first black president, may be building a profound advantage in the competition for those voters — despite the past popularity of Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, among African-Americans.
Click here to read the rest of this story on Yahoo News.
The New York Times has a similar story with some different observations.
Senator Barack Obama proved in South Carolina on Saturday that he could not only endure everything the Clinton campaign threw at him in the most confrontational week of the presidential contest so far but also draw votes across racial lines even in a Southern state.
Still, his victory came in part because Mr. Obama was able to turn out large numbers of black voters, a dynamic that will not necessarily prove as decisive in the 22 states that hold nominating contests on Feb. 5.
And his share of the white vote in South Carolina, 24 percent, was lower than what he drew in Iowa or New Hampshire, raising questions about whether race will divide Democrats even as the party shows tremendous enthusiasm for its candidates.
If the South Carolina result buoyed the Obama team, it left Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign facing a new set of questions. Her advisers’ steady attacks on Mr. Obama appeared to prove fruitless, if not counterproductive, and the attack-dog role of former President Bill Clinton seemed to have backfired.
Surveys of voters leaving the polls showed that many Democrats who believed that Mr. Clinton’s role in the campaign was important ended up voting for Mr. Obama. Click here to read more in the New York Times.
Click here if you would like to listen and/or watch Barack Obama’s victory speech which has been posted to his campaign website.