LAS VEGAS, Nevada (Agencies)
Arizona Sen. John McCain won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, strengthening his claim to the Republican U.S. presidential nomination, as Democratic White House hopeful Hillary Clinton outpolled Barack Obama in Nevada to notch up a second straight win over her rival.
Gaining a morale-booster ahead of the next vote, the former first lady bidding to be America's first woman president won 51 percent of the popular vote in the Nevada caucuses, against 45 percent for Obama. John Edwards limped in third with four percent.
"This is one step on a long journey throughout the country as we put our cases forward and take that case to the people, and this was an especially wonderful day for me," Clinton told supporters.
But in a sign of how close the race is, Obama's campaign contended that the Illinois senator had in fact won more delegates to the national convention that will choose the Democrats' presidential candidate in the November election.
Jeff Berman, the director of delegate distribution for Obama, said Clinton had been beaten 13-12 on the delegate count, citing complicated rules on weighting of votes in northern and rural areas of Nevada.
Nevada Democratic Party chairwoman Jill Derby dismissed the claim, noting that the state party would only apportion its delegates for the August presidential convention on April 19.
"We're trying to figure out what they are basing this on," she told AFP.
In its own terse statement, the Clinton campaign said: "Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses today by winning a majority of the delegates at stake. The Obama campaign is wrong."
Mitt Romney was the Republican winner in Nevada and was fighting for third place in South Carolina against former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson. With about 65 percent of the results in, McCain led 34 percent to 29 percent.
McCain, an Arizona senator who won New Hampshire's Republican election, saw his 2000 presidential bid crippled by a bitter loss to President George W. Bush in South Carolina, a state where since 1980 the Republican winner has gone on to capture the party's presidential nomination.
Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and a Baptist preacher, was hoping to capitalize on his Southern roots and hoping to make inroads with the state's large bloc of evangelicals, a group that fueled his win in Iowa.
U.S. media projected, however, that the independent-minded McCain, who earlier won New Hampshire, has already won. The win gives McCain, an Iraq war supporter and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, momentum going into the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests, when nearly half the U.S. states choose Democratic and Republican candidates for the Nov. 4 presidential election.
Huckabee later conceded defeat to McCain in South Carolina. |
