Once Again, It’s Close

As the dust settles from Tuesday’s “national primary,” we know two things: John McCain is the Republican front-runner and the Democrats still have a race on their hands. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama swapped states all night. Obama won more states overall, but Hillary took home the big prizes of California and New York.

Obama’s increasing momentum was not enough to overcome Clinton’s leads, but that doesn’t mean his campaign has come to an abrupt halt. Obama raised more than twice as much as Clinton in January, and time is widely considered his ally.

At every step of this contest, we’ve been told the winner would be revealed shortly. We should know better by now.

Update: To give you a sense of how close the polling was, Time estimates that Hillary won 50.2 percent of the popular vote, to Barack’s 49.8. That’s a difference of 0.4 percent, or 53,120 people.

MSNBC:

California was the big prize of the night, and Clinton was winning well more than half of the vote. The state offered 370 delegates, but because of the Democratic nominating rules, Clinton will not win all of them. Combined with Sen. Barack Obama’s win in his home state of Illinois and his significant haul of delegates in numerous smaller states, the race for the Democratic nomination was likely to be a dead heat.

Clinton’s victories included New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey in addition to California, according to NBC News’ projections from official returns and extensive exit-polling data. She also picked up victories in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arizona.

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