Voters in Northern Virginia and the Tidewater carried Democrat Barack Obama to a surprisingly strong victory over rival Hillary Clinton Tuesday in a primary that surpassed recent turnout records.
Obama took a vast majority of black votes while evenly splitting white votes with Clinton.
The Illinois senator captured 63 percent of the vote to 36 percent for his rival, scoring well among white males, and attracting voters across a broad range of age and economic categories.
In the Republican nomination fight, Arizona Sen. John McCain won a narrow victory over long-shot candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, but took all of the state’s 63 delegates. The victory moved McCain closer to the GOP nomination, though it signals tough times ahead with conservatives.
The commonwealth was considered the most contested of the three primaries held on Tuesday. Clinton had at least hoped to secure enough votes to blunt Obama’s momentum and take a sizable minority of the state’s 85 delegates.
But Clinton won only a single congressional district that encompasses the poor and overwhelmingly white southwest corner of the state.
The primary drew more of the state’s 4.6 million registered voters than any recent election.
Gov. Tim Kaine, who endorsed Obama a year ago and campaigned hard for him across the country, said he predicted the senator would do well with independent voters.
“Virginia voters are a pretty independent bunch,” he said in Richmond on Tuesday.
Exit polls indicated the two Democrats tied among whites, with white men breaking for Obama and white women for Clinton, though by a surprisingly small margin. Nine out of 10 blacks voted for Obama.
Obama swept Northern Virginia, especially the affluent inner suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria, as well areas with large black populations like Richmond and Norfolk.
Lines backed up at polling places early in the day, including at Arlington’s Swanson Middle School, which saw 441 Democratic voters and only 74 Republicans by noon, said Barbara Nyman, the precinct’s chief election officer.
Meg Merwin, 29, delivered her vote there for Obama “because I’m tired of the same-old, same-old regime,” referring to nation’s recent history of Clinton or Bush presidencies.
Though the two Republicans stood neck-and-neck for much of the night, McCain won 49 percent votes to Huckabee’s 41 percent. Huckabee, who has a stronger appeal to evangelicals, held strong in the rural Shenandoah Valley and southwest, though McCain took the traditionally more moderate Republican base in Northern Virginia.
