CHARLESTON, S.C. — Barack Obama romped to victory Saturday in the South Carolina presidential primary, powered by black voters energized by the prospect of electing the nation’s first African American president.
The victory gives the Illinois senator a big lift heading into the coast-to-coast balloting Feb. 5.
But the outcome, after a week of racially charged campaigning, also pointed to a heavily polarized electorate. Obama won four out of five black votes. But after finishing a strong first in Iowa early this month — one of the whitest states in the country — he carried just a quarter of South Carolina’s white vote, according to exit polls.
Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, who split most of the white vote, finished second and third, respectively.
With almost all of the ballots counted, Obama had 55 percent of the total vote, Clinton 27 percent and Edwards 18 percent.
Clinton, who left the state for Tennessee around the time polls closed at 7 p.m., called Obama to extend her congratulations. In a written statement, the New York senator said, “We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the 22 states as well as American Samoa who will vote on Feb. 5.” Earlier in the day, Clinton’s campaign issued a statement downplaying her prospects in South Carolina and pointing to the contests that follow.
The race was called so early that the doors to the Obama victory party were still closed when NBC broadcast the Illinois senator’s picture under the words “projected winner.” Only the cheers of a handful of jubilant staffers rang out in the cavernous exhibition space at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, where Obama declared victory Saturday evening.
An hour before the candidate arrived, the crowd began to swell. When “Obama 75, Clinton 15, Edwards 10” flashed on the big-screen television, the growing crowd began to chant, “Yes, we can!”
Communications director Robert Gibbs credited what he called the “record turnout” with helping propel Obama to victory. And he discounted early polls that showed the candidate bleeding away white voters.
“I do believe South Carolina — across racial lines, across income lines, across age lines — spoke in a loud and clear way to reject the politics of the past,” Gibbs said, “that they wanted something different, that they wanted a candidate who could bring the country together to solve the problems that people face.”
Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, said Saturday morning he was in the race to stay, regardless of what happened at the polls.
South Carolina presented the first Southern primary of the Democratic contest and was the first contested state with a significant black population. Exit polls indicated about half of those who turned out were black, and many arrived with an eye on history.
Around noon Saturday, 17 consecutive black voters leaving a polling place in working-class Orangeburg said they had cast their ballots for Obama.
“It tells me that people and times are changing,” said Sarah Favors, who has taught for 25 years at historically black South Carolina State University.
There were 45 pledged delegates at stake in Saturday’s voting, to be divided on a proportional basis. But more significant was the momentum that comes with victory, which has gone back and forth between Obama and Clinton on virtually a weekly basis since his opening win in Iowa.
South Carolina, a state with a history of incendiary elections, is where an already nasty contest turned raw and racial.
Obama and Clinton clashed in the harshest debate of the campaign: He derided her service “as a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart,” while she accused him of doing the legal bidding of a Chicago slumlord. Their venom carried over to the airwaves.
Clinton broadcast a radio spot suggesting Obama was at heart a Reagan Republican. Obama responded with an assertion that Clinton would “say anything to get elected.”
Clinton left the state for two days midweek and placed her campaign in the formidable hands of her husband, who won South Carolina in his 1992 White House run. Critics accused the former president of injecting race into the contest through a series of veiled remarks; he angrily denied the assertion. Whatever the cause, polls showed an increasing gap between black and white Democrats as the week passed.
Interviews conducted with voters leaving their polling place Saturday suggested Clinton may not have helped his wife; those who said Bill Clinton’s participation was an important factor favored Obama, according to the survey conducted for television networks and The Associated Press.
Some worried the campaign opened wounds that “could leave a lot of scar tissue,” as Bill Carrick, a neutral Democratic strategist, put it.
“There’s just a widespread feeling from people, not just in the Obama camp, that we don’t want to see a lot of back-and-forth like that in the run-up to February 5 and beyond,” Carrick said.
The acrid tone created an opening for Edwards, who called himself the “grown-up” in the contest and pressed his case in radio and TV ads that reprised his 2004 role as the happy fellow in the presidential race. “This is not about us personally,” Edwards said in his closing television spot. “It is about what we are trying to do for this country.”
The Democratic race so far has been a series of single-state battles in discrete regions: Iowa in the Midwest, New Hampshire in the northeast, Nevada in the West and South Carolina in the Old Confederacy.
The major focus from here out is Feb. 5, when more than 20 states — from New York to California — hold nominating contests. At stake will be nearly 1,700 national convention delegates, far more than half the number needed to secure the nomination.
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