By Mike Manzoni and Samuel Rubenfeld
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) won the Pennsylvania primary Tuesday after an intensive six-week campaign, allowing her to continue arguing that she is a viable candidate who can win big states and deserves the nomination.
Her win translated into an instant fundraising boom: within 24 hours of Clinton’s victory speech, the campaign claimed $10 million from 70,000 new donors, most of it online. Her campaign was broke and in debt going into the primary night in Pennsylvania.
The victory has the Clinton camp questioning her rival’s electability in the general election next fall since he has been unable to win battleground states considered crucial in November, including California, Texas and Ohio. But as her camp celebrates its win, Clinton still trails rival Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) overall in popular votes and in pledged delegates.
“It’s a long road to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and it runs right through the heart of Pennsylvania,” she told a crowd of supporters at a victory speech in Philadelphia.
While her campaign said her victory is yet another sign Obama will have trouble in the general election with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), she offered some comparison between the two competing Democratic camps.
Clinton said she and Obama are “on this journey together,” while joined on stage by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, her husband, President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea.
Clinton’s victory came from demographics who have helped her in other states: white working women, low-income voters and Catholics, 72 percent of whom chose Clinton over Obama, according to an NBC News exit poll. The NBC News exit poll also found
Knowing these demographics were not in his favor, Obama moved his campaign to Indiana early Tuesday, a state that holds its primary in two weeks.
“A win is 50 plus one. So if Sen. Clinton gets over 50 percent, she’s won the state and, you know, I don’t try to pretend that I enjoy getting 45 percent and that’s a moral victory – we’ve lost the state,” Obama said before leaving Pennsylvania for Indiana.
Obama currently leads the delegate count with 1,719 to Clinton’s 1,586.
Her victory in the Keystone State will allow her to receive 81 of the state’s 158 delegates, with Obama getting 69.
Immediately following the Pennyslvania contest, both candidates set their sights on the next two contests in Indiana and North Carolina, where the campaigning is getting even more negative.
Each candidate has issued highly negative mailers in Indiana. Obama’s mailer features Clinton on the cover of an issue of Fortune magazine with the headline “Business loves Hillary,” and in a banner above the magazine, the mailer says “We can’t trust Hillary Clinton to protect Indiana jobs.”
Clinton’s mailer says that Obama’s health care plan will leave 15 million Americans without health insurance, and it asks: “Will it be you?”
In North Carolina, the state Republican party, in an attempt to attack local candidates, are openly hitting Obama on race issues, releasing an advertisement that plays a clip from Obama’s controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright next to pictures of Obama with local elected officials with a voice-over saying “He [Obama’s] too extreme for North Carolina.”
The Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign have both asked the state party to pull the ad, but according to a Politico.com blog post, there is no indication that the party will do so.
The North Carolina GOP spokesman Brent Woolcox, in a response posted on Politico, wrote that the ad was “about patriotism and judgment, not race.”
“If Hillary Clinton had a white pastor and that said the same things Wright said and North Carolina’s Democrat Gubernatorial candidates had endorsed her, we’d be running the same ad,” Woolcox added.
Both candidates started the next wave of campaigning with an extra superdelegate as they made stops in Indiana yesterday. Clinton picked up the endorsement of Tennessee Rep. John S. Tanner and Obama was endorsed by Charles B. Henry, Oklahoma’s governor and a superdelegate to the Democratic Convention.
As the next drive for votes began, Obama learned of a hack into his campaign Web site, according to an Associated Press report. Site visitors who clicked onto the community blogs section of Obama’s homepage were redirected to Clinton’s Web site.
Researchers say the hacker gained access by inserting code through a process experts called “cross-site scripting.”
The problem was fixed immediately and the Web site is now functioning properly.
Obama is leading in the polls in North Carolina, but it is still a tight race in Indiana where the blue-collar demographics would appear to favor Clinton.
It appears now that neither candidate will attain the necessary 2,025 delegates to get the party’s nomination by the end of primary season in June, increasing the likelihood that the nomination will be decided by superdelegates.
Indiana and North Carolina hold primaries May 6.
This article was supplemented by reports from multiple news services.