Hillary grabs Pennsylvania primary in survival battle
Foreign Desk Report

WASHINGTON—Hillary Rodham Clinton won the most delegates in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary. Clinton won at least 80 of the 158 delegates up for grabs in Tuesday’s contest, according to an analysis of election returns by The Associated Press. Sen. Barack Obama won at least 66, with 12 still to be awarded.
The final delegate count was delayed because many of Pennsylvania’s counties are split into multiple congressional districts. Pennsylvania awards delegates according to the statewide vote as well as the vote in individual congressional districts.
Election officials were expected to continue working Wednesday to assign votes from split counties to the appropriate congressional districts. In the overall race for the nomination, Obama led with 1,714.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,589.5 delegates, according to the AP tally.
It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain clinched the party’s nomination in March. The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions this summer.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate’s level of support at the caucus doesn’t change.
Democrats braced for weeks more of bitter fighting Wednesday after Hillary Clinton scored a solid win over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, keeping her fragile White House hopes alive.
The former first lady claimed a groundswell of new support, with three million dollars in fresh campaign cash raised online since her 10-point victory Tuesday, and made it clear she was in the marathon race for the duration.
“We won a critically important victory tonight in Pennsylvania. It’s a giant step forward that will transform the landscape of the presidential race,” the former first lady said in a jubilant note to supporters late Tuesday.
“You know, some people counted me out and wanted me to drop out,” she told a victory rally earlier. “Well, the American people do not quit, and they deserve an American president who does not quit either.”
With nearly all votes counted, Clinton snapped up 55 percent of the vote to 45 for Obama in her bid to be the first woman president of the United States. She faced formidable obstacles as the race entered the final stretch of nine contests in six weeks, including closely watched contests in midwestern Indiana and the southern state of North Carolina on May 6.
Clinton, 60, still trails Obama in states won, pledged delegates, fundraising and the popular vote. But she argued that her double-digit win in Pennsylvania would weigh heavily among the 800 unelected “superdelegates” who hold the key to the nomination for the right to face Republican John McCain in November.
“I believe in the last month I’ve demonstrated a real strength ... the kind of strength that delegates have to look at. After all, they have to exercise independent judgment as to who they think is the better candidate to win,” she told NBC in an interview early Wednesday.
Her solid win Tuesday night raised anew the prospect that the battle for the nomination could drag on to the Democratic convention in late August in Denver, Colorado, despite the hopes of party leaders to avoid a divisive floor fight. Obama, 46, had downplayed any likelihood that he could win in Pennsylvania, but pointed out that he had whittled down her lead from 20 points.