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Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won a strong victory over Senator Barack Obama in Tuesday’s primary in West Virginia, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually salient factor as Mrs. Clinton drew strong support from white, working-class voters who have spurned Mr. Obama in recent contests.
The numberof white Democratic voters who said that race influenced their choice on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the Clinton-Obama nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said that race was an important factor in their vote, and more than 8 in 10 of them backed Mrs. Clinton, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.
With Mr. Obama still solidly ahead of Mrs. Clinton in the delegate fight, the West Virginia results are unlikely to adversely affect Mr. Obama’s chances of winning the nomination. Yet a strong Clinton victory in another general election battleground state — like her wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania this spring — could raise fresh questions about Mr. Obama’s ability to carry swing states in a contest against Senator John McCain in the fall.
The voter surveys showing a strong racial component to the West Virginia voting suggest that Mr. Obama would still face pockets of significant Democratic resistance if he does become the party’s first black nominee. While he has argued that he could broaden the Democratic base in the fall, given his popularity with independents and his strong showing in traditionally Republican states like Colorado and Virginia, the Clinton camp has pointed to his modest support from white voters and blue-collar workers as weak links in his coalition.
Obama supporters accused Mrs. Clinton of playing the race card last week when she explicitly said that she had more support among “white Americans” than he did. Yet however blunt she may have been, white and financially struggling voters in West Virginia — and in Kentucky, which votes next week and which Mr. Obama has all but conceded to Mrs. Clinton — have become a major force keeping her in the presidential race at this late stage.
Mrs. Clinton declared victory less than two hours after the West Virginia polls closed, speaking to supporters in Charleston and telling them: “This race isn’t over yet. Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win.” She also said, “I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign until everyone has had their chance to make their voices heard.”
Mrs. Clinton seized on the West Virginia results Tuesday night in an area where she needs particular help: fund-raising. Roughly $20 million in debt despite $11 million in personal loans from Mrs. Clinton, her campaign sent a text message to supporters’ cell phones less than an hour after the polls closed, hailing the victory and urging them to donate money at her Web site. A similar pitch arrived by e-mail two minutes later.
“With your help, I’m going to carry the energy of tonight’s victory into the next contests in Kentucky and Oregon,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in the e-mail, referring to the primaries on May 20. “And just as always, I’ll be depending on you to share every step of this journey with me. You have worked your heart out, put yourself on the line for what you believe in, and given generously. And I’m not about to turn my back on you.”
The West Virginia results offered some troubling signs for Mr. Obama. While exit polls in other states have indicated that many Clinton supporters, including many whites, would back Mr. Obama in the fall, more than half of West Virginia voters said they would be dissatisfied if Mr. Obama won the nomination, according to the voter surveys conducted by Edison/Mitofsky.
As the Clinton campaign noted in a strategy memo on Tuesday, no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916. Bill Clinton carried the state in 1992 and 1996, but Al Gore and John Kerry lost the state in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
Mr. Obama, who largely skipped campaigning in West Virginia and spent Tuesday in another battleground, Missouri, said at a campaign event there that he was confident he could unify the party as the nominee.
“There is a lot of talk these days about how the Democratic Party is divided, but I’m not worried because I know that we’ll be able to come together quickly behind a common purpose,” Mr. Obama said. “There’s too much that unites us as Democrats. There’s too much at stake for our country.”
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, said in an interview Tuesday night that despite the Clinton campaign’s heavy debt, "we will have the money to play in the next three weeks" until the June 3 end of the nominating contests. He said that Mrs. Clinton has expressed a willingness to lend the campaign more money if she believes it will help but that she has not reached that conclusion yet. "We haven’t had that discussion," Mr. McAuliffe said.
For all of Mrs. Clinton’s efforts, Mr. Obama continued to far outpace her on Tuesday in the battle for superdelegates — the party leaders who have a vote on the nomination — picking up four endorsements by midday. And in a sign of the diminished optimism in the Clinton camp, one of her staunchest loyalists, James Carville, said that Mr. Obama would probably be the Democratic nominee.
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