McCain scoops South Carolina as Clinton wins tight Nevada race - Yahoo! News

McCain scoops South Carolina as Clinton wins tight Nevada race - Yahoo! News: "McCain scoops South Carolina as Clinton wins tight Nevada race" by Porter Barron 56 minutes ago COLUMBIA, South Carolina (AFP) - Republican White House hopeful John McCain Saturday scooped a sweet victory in South Carolina while Democrat Hillary Clinton took Nevada to hand the two front-running candidates big wins. Senator McCain was ahead with 33 percent of the vote over 30 percent for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in the state that eight years ago destroyed his presidential hopes. Clinton, the former first lady bidding to be the first woman US president, earlier won 51 percent of the popular vote in the Nevada caucuses, against 45 percent for Barack Obama. John Edwards trailed with just four percent. "This is one step on a long journey throughout the country as we put our cases forward and take that case to the people, and this was an especially wonderful day for me," Clinton told cheering supporters. But in a sign of how close the race is, Obama's campaign contended that the Illinois senator had in fact won more delegates to the national convention that will choose the Democrats' presidential candidate in the November election. The claim was disputed by both the Nevada Democratic Party's leader and the Clinton campaign, which said Obama's team was plain "wrong." In South Carolina, Huckabee offered his congratulations to McCain as the Baptist preacher went down to defeat despite counting on the support of the state's legions of evangelical Christians. "I had rather be where I am and have done it with honor than to have done it with the dishonor of attacking someone else," Huckabee told a rally, after a campaign marked by suspect telephone calls to voters and anti-McCain flyers. McCain buried the ghosts of his defeat here in the 2000 primary, when he lost to George W. Bush after a poisonous campaign polluted by smears that were low even for South Carolina's no-holds-barred politics. Following his win in New Hampshire, the South Carolina result will help McCain cement front-runner status in the splintered Republican field heading into the Florida primary on January 29 and then "Super Tuesday" on February 5. The New York senator's fresh triumph over Obama gives her campaign a shot of energy ahead of South Carolina's Democratic primary next Saturday, leading into Super Tuesday when more than 20 states will be up for grabs. Obama, who beat Clinton in Iowa at the start of the 2008 race only to see her come back in New Hampshire, pledged that his bid to be the country's first black president was far from over. "We ran an honest, uplifting campaign in Nevada that focused on the real problems Americans are facing, a campaign that appealed to people's hopes instead of their fears," he said. "That's the campaign we'll take to South Carolina and across America in the weeks to come, and that's how we will truly bring about the change this country is hungry for." Earlier Saturday, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney easily won Nevada's Republican vote, adding to his victories in Michigan and Wyoming. The wealthy former venture capitalist was the only top-tier Republican to campaign in Nevada, after his rivals had spurned the western desert state in favor of the South Carolina primary. A winter storm chilled the normally balmy South Carolina, which has chosen the eventual Republican nominee in every race since 1980 and has even more influence this year heading into Super Tuesday. With some 97 percent of South Carolina precincts reporting, McCain had 33 percent over Huckabee's 30 percent. The laidback Fred Thompson, a star of "Law and Order" and a former senator for Tennessee, was in third place on 16 percent, a point ahead of Romney. Thompson gave no indication of whether he might pull out of the Republican race after failing to do better in South Carolina, despite belatedly picking up the pace of his campaigning in recent days.