Senator Barack Obama beat Senator Hillary Clinton in Mississippi's Democratic primary, riding huge support from black Americans, as a nasty new race row rocked their White House battle.
The Illinois senator punched back with his second win in a row since the Clinton's campaign-saving wins in Texas and Ohio last week, which halted his own 12-contest win streak.
Even as Mississippi voted, the tone of the contest took another negative lurch, as the Obama camp demanded the ouster of Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro, who put Obama's stunning rise in US politics down to his race.
With its 33 nominating delegates, conservative, Deep South Mississippi, reliably Republican in general elections, was the last showdown in the Democratic race before the more significant Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
Mississippi did not change the race, but allowed Obama to pad his lead for nominating delegates doled out after each state contest.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting in Mississippi, Obama won 61 percent of the vote compared to 37 percent for Clinton.
Television exit polls showed a large racial divide: half of the Democratic electorate were black Americans, nine in 10 of whom went for Obama, according to MSNBC figures.
Fox News exit polls said white men voted for Clinton 69 to 30 percent, and white women by 74 percent to 26 percent.
According to a tally by RealClearPolitics.com, the Mississippi victory left Obama with 1,606 delegates compared to 1,484 for Clinton -- both well short of the 2,025 necessary to clinch the party's nomination.
The latest racially tinged row of an increasingly ugly campaign raged after Ferraro told a California newspaper: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."
The first black American with a viable shot at the White House, Obama called the remarks by the woman who made history as the Democrats' 1984 vice presidential candidate "patently absurd."
"I don't think that Geraldine Ferraro's comments have any place in our politics or the Democratic Party," he told Pennsylvania newspaper the Morning Call.
His campaign clamored for Ferraro's head, noting the swift resignation of an Obama aide last week after her remark that Clinton was a "monster."
"When you wink and nod at offensive statements," said Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, "you're really telling your supporters that anything goes."
Clinton said she did "not agree" with the comments and found it "regrettable" that supporters might resort to personal attacks, but did not cut Ferraro loose from her finance committee.
"We ought to keep this focused on the issues. That's what this campaign should be about," she said in Pennsylvania.
In a second interview with the Daily Breeze, which carried her original remarks, Ferraro escalated the row.
"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up," she said.
"Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?" she said.
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