Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama plunged straight into the next, nationwide stage of the battle for the Democratic nomination on Wednesday after Clinton’s stunning comeback in the New Hampshire primary, both embarking on a fresh round of campaign events and fundraising.
Clinton, having regained frontrunner status, announced a series of rallies, political endorsements and campaign events across 14 states. ”Momentum is clearly on our side,” said her campaign chairperson, Terry McAuliffe. ”Voters across the country are going to see what New Hampshire voters saw.”
Putting the defeat behind him, Obama headed to Boston, New Jersey and New York to campaign and raise funds and was scheduled to arrive in South Carolina, the next key contest, on Thursday. The New Jersey rally was a demonstration of Obama’s intention to take the fight to Clinton’s backyard, the neighbouring state to New York, where she is senator.
The Democratic contest is now essentially a two-horse race, after John Edwards came a distant third in the New Hampshire primary. Clinton’s victory defied the pollsters — whose surveys were spectacularly wrong in indicating the result — and surprised even her own campaign team.
With the results from one town still to come in, Clinton won 39% of the New Hampshire vote, Obama 37%, Edwards 17%, and Bill Richardson 5%.
Her comeback from her humiliating defeat in Iowa leaves the Democratic race even more volatile, and likely to continue to attract voters after record turnouts in New Hampshire and Iowa.
On the Republican side, John McCain had 37% of the vote against 32% for Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee, the victor in Iowa, was third with 11%. Rudy Giuliani had 9%, and Ron Paul 8%. Fred Thompson barely registered, with 1% support.
About 526 671 residents took advantage of unseasonably warm weather to turn out to vote, setting a state record.
Exit polls suggest that Clinton owed her victory to a traditional Democratic demographic — plus a surge of support from women.
Exit polls suggested Clinton had 46% support among women against 34% for Obama. Despite her win, Clinton went into a planned huddle with her campaign team for a postmortem examination of her defeat in Iowa. She is expected to bring in new staff.
They debated whether to spend as much time as planned in South Carolina, fearing that the estimated 50% of the Democratic electorate that is African-American will swing behind Obama.
She is moving, as Giuliani has in the Republican race, to concentrate on the big states, such as California and New York, which vote on February 5.
The next Democratic contest is in Nevada on January 19 and Obama received a boost when a big union in the state, representing 17 500 health and county workers, endorsed him, and another was on the verge of doing so.
In a conference call with reporters, Clinton campaign officials said she was energised. ”I cannot tell you how excited and fired up she is,” McAuliffe said. He claimed the campaign website was getting 500 hits a minute, and that they took in $750 000 in online contributions within 12 hours of her victory. ”You can feel the tremendous momentum, the enthusiasm that came out.” — Â