FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I am Farai Chideya.
Voters in South Carolina's Democratic primary had their say on Saturday. The person they chose: Barack Obama, by a two-to-one margin over second-place finisher Hillary Clinton.
Senator BARACK OBAMA (Democrat, Illinois; Presidential Candidate): After four great contests, in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates…
(Soundbite of applause)
Sen. OBAMA: …and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we've seen in a long, long time.
CHIDEYA: But did South Carolina's primary highlight more of the racial fault lines in the presidential campaigns? Here to give us a sense of what South Carolina means and what's next in presidential politics. We've got Ron Elving. He's NPR senior Washington editor. Hey, Ron.
RON ELVING: Good to be with you, Farai.
CHIDEYA: Thank you so much. Now, the polls had Barack Obama in the lead right before the primary, and he did win big. But were you surprised by how much he won?
ELVING: Yes. The polls had been showing about 40 percent for Barack Obama, 30 for Hillary Clinton and the last 20 percent for Senator John Edwards. And while that did not quite account for all the votes, usually the people who are undecided in the last polls distribute fairly closely to the proportions we see in the poll.
In this case, that was not so. In this case, the poll was understating, understating Barack Obama's standing with the voters by about 15 percentage points. And that, by the way, was about the best poll for Barack that we had seen.
So in this particular instance, we saw the African-American candidate actually outpoll substantially his showing in the surveys that have been done of opinion prior to the election itself.
CHIDEYA: Things broke a different way in New Hampshire. And how do you think race played into this voting?
ELVING: The voting in South Carolina obviously had a distinct racial characteristic. There's no denying it. While there are many interesting things to be said about the demographics of this vote and how Barack Obama appealed to various age groups, winning everyone under the age of 60, or losing only the age group over 60, doing equally well among men and women and so on - lots of interesting things to say. But what everyone is going to focus on inevitably is the fact that he won 80 percent of the African-American vote and only about 25 percent of the white vote.
And, of course, in South Carolina, where a slight majority of the total vote was cast by black voters, that was just positive. That was all you needed to know. He walked away with a proportion of the majority that was going to make him the big-time winner.
Now, what does that mean going forward to states where half the vote is not going to be cast in the Democratic primary by African-Americans? That is the key question and that is the question the Democratic Party needs to confront at this point. Does it have a white slate of candidates and a black candidate? Or, can the enthusiasms that were shown by African-Americans in South Carolina be generalized to Democratic voters in other states regardless of race?
CHIDEYA: Without going into speculation, does it seem as if the voting base is actually becoming - in the clip that we heard from Senator Obama's speech, he was saying it's this diverse coalition, but it sounds in some ways as if there may be some racial fault lines actually appearing at this time.
ELVING: It is a diverse coalition in every respect other than race, and in South Carolina, it tended to be particularly heavy in terms of African-Americans. In his support in other places, that has not been necessarily the case. It was the case in Michigan. It was, to some degree, the case in Nevada, although the number of African-Americans voting there was rather small.
It was not the case in Iowa, where he won the caucuses, and it was not the case in New Hampshire, where he was just a few points behind the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, in the New Hampshire primary.
So it hasn't necessarily been a universal pattern. It has not been a case of his being limited to black voters in the early events. It's a case of his having gotten to this one state of South Carolina, which, I should add, was moved up to the front end of the calendar specifically to give an early voting opportunity to a state that had a substantial black vote because New Hampshire doesn't, Iowa doesn't, the rest of the country does.
So the Democratic Party made a strategic decision that it was going to have Nevada and South Carolina added to the January calendar along with white Iowa, white New Hampshire, so that you could get more diversity in the early events before we got to Super Tuesday.
And, lo and behold, no great surprise. By doing that, you did get a Latino community weighing in strongly for one candidate in Nevada, and that was Hillary Clinton, and now an African-American community weighing in heavily for another candidate in South Carolina.
CHIDEYA: Let's talk just briefly about Florida. Both parties have a primary, but the Republican primary - the Democratic delegates won't really count, so the Republicans are the ones in the hot seat. And now, there's a lot of reference to McCain being a leader, but this is still a tight race, isn't it?
ELVING: Yes, and he is barely ahead. Really, the poll I saw this morning from Suffolk University, which did a very good job polling in New Hampshire when virtually nobody else got it right, Suffolk says it's McCain by three points. That's inside the margin of error.
It's a statistical tie between John McCain and Mitt Romney. And here's something that's really throwing us off. In this particular case, it's not a poll predicting how everybody is going to vote. It's a poll predicting how some people are going to vote tomorrow when they hold the primary.
Unfortunately, from the standpoint of the pollster, those aren't the only votes. There have already been hundreds of thousands of votes cast, already cast, by mail and in special early voting stations under Florida law. So we won't know who's in those until tomorrow night, and it's very hard to poll them.
So we don't really know where this race stands. I don't think we're going to see anyone emerge to challenge the two that we've been talking about - it's a two-man race between McCain and Mitt Romney - but I believe that that one is way too close to call. I'm not sure anybody has any idea how that's going to come out.
CHIDEYA: Well, thanks, Ron.
ELVING: Always a pleasure, Farai.
CHIDEYA: That was NPR senior Washington Editor Ron Elving and he joined us from NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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