John Kerry established his national appeal to Democrats with commanding victories in far-flung presidential nomination contests from Arizona to Delaware. John Edwards and Wesley Clark denied him a clean sweep in the winnowing race.
Kerry easily prevailed in five states among the seven voting on Tuesday in primaries and caucuses, piling delegates into his column and making it ever harder for his rivals to see any way to stop him.
The series drove Joe Lieberman, the vice presidential candidate of 2000, from the race, and imperiled the candidacy of one-time sensation Howard Dean, who set low expectations for the night and did not exceed them.
"Now we will carry this campaign and the cause of a stronger, fairer, more prosperous America to every part of America," Kerry said.
His rivals were running short on the treasure and time to mount that sort of national battle.
Clark and Edwards were all but ceding the next contests -- Michigan and Washington state on Saturday -- in favor of a showdown with Kerry on Feb. 10 in Virginia and Tennessee. Dean was falling back to the Wisconsin contest a week after that.
Edwards, a North Carolina senator, went into Tuesday saying he had to win South Carolina, the state of his birth, and he did.
"We won South Carolina in a resounding fashion and won both the African-American and white vote in South Carolina, and we go from here to other states -- Michigan, Virginia and Tennessee," Edwards said.
Clark, a retired NATO supreme allied commander, battled Edwards to a close victory in Oklahoma, an equally crucial test of his viability.
Still, there was no denying Kerry the "Big Mo," as Clark put it.
"This could be over; it could be a long way from over," he said, "and it could be impacted tomorrow by something we don't know about."
Kerry coasted to victory in the five states he won -- Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico and North Dakota -- in the first broadly based round of voting in the Democratic primary season.
Of the 269 pledged delegates at stake Tuesday night, an AP analysis showed Kerry winning 128, Edwards 61, Clark 49, Dean seven, and Sharpton with one, with 23 yet to be allocated.
Kerry won the two states with the most delegates, Missouri and Arizona, while Clark and Edwards divided the next two biggest prizes.
The results pushed Kerry to just over 200 of the 2,162 delegates needed for the nomination, including the superdelegates of lawmakers and party traditionalists. Dean trailed by nearly 90, Edwards by more than 100.
And Kerry demonstrated his strength across the range of Democratic voters, winning big among Hispanics in Arizona and all racial and income groups in Missouri, where he piled up a nearly 2-to-1 win over his nearest rival, Edwards.
Voters surveyed as they left polling places liked the four-term Massachusetts senator for the same reasons mentioned by the Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire who sent him bursting out of the starting gate. They cited his experience and said he seemed most able to beat President Bush.
Kerry got at least half the vote in Missouri, North Dakota and Delaware and won by about 15 percentage points in Arizona and New Mexico.
Lieberman, a moderate Connecticut senator whose support for the Iraq war stood out in a Democratic field of war critics, had pinned his last hopes on winning Delaware, where he finished with 11 percent of the vote, a distant second that had just a handful of votes ahead of Edwards and Dean.
RSS