With little suspense, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York won her home state’s Democratic primary and Sen. John McCain of Arizona was the Republican winner Tuesday.
On the Super Tuesday, a virtual national primary day, 24 states went to poll, with a total of 1,081 delegates at stake.
New York has a whopping 281 delegates for the Democrats; Republicans, 101. McCain gets all those in the winner-take-all GOP primary. But Clinton will share the Democratic delegates to the party’s nominating convention, based on the final proportion of her vote.
At 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the projected results for the presidential nomination in both the camps were:
Democrats — Sen. Clinton won by 59 percent of the votes over Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who settled at 39 percent. As of now, Sen. Clinton has a total 59 delegates as compared to 12 delegates for Sen. Obama.
Republican — Sen. John McCain racked up 49 percent of votes with all the 101 delegates. Also, he won New Jersey and Connecticut, emerging as a clear conqueror of the big states in Northeast. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won his home state but only 28 percent of votes in New York.
The Northeast region has emerged as a strong ground for Clinton. She captured Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.
But, it is not all bad news for Obama, who had early victories in the South and his home state of Illinois.
California is the most significant state in the Super Tuesday results for both the parties. Republicans have 173 delegates and the Democrats have 441 delegates at stake there.
At the polls on Tuesday in Onondaga County, many Democratic voters were torn between Clinton and Obama until they exited the polling booth.
At the Civic Center in downtown Syracuse, John Miranda, 61, was unsure of his choice until a commercial on television made all the difference for him. Clinton’s commercial on energy crisis, where she proposed the way to fight oil prices, prompted him to vote her. “That’s been my personal thing since the fake oil crisis of ‘73,” he said. “To me,” he added, “energy is a key issue. It has everything to do with our economy. And since oil has peaked, we need to get on the track with a new energy direction.”
(Trina Joshi is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
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