In the sharpest racial divide seen yet in the Democratic campaign for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama saw overwhelming support among black voters, while whites lined  up strongly behind Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Nine in 10 blacks were backing Obama, while seven in 10 whites were voting for Clinton, according to interviews with voters leaving polling places. That gave Obama the edge because those who were voting split about evenly between the two races.

While Obama, an Illinois senator, has typically received lopsided numbers of black votes and Clinton, a New York senator, generally has won among whites, Tuesday's racial polarization was stark.

Only in two other states have more than seven in 10 whites backed Clinton, and both were in the South -- next-door Alabama and Arkansas, where she was first lady while her husband, Bill Clinton, was governor.

Four in 10 blacks said race was important in choosing their candidate. Of that group, nine in 10 supported Obama. Among whites, a quarter said race was an important factor in deciding their vote. Nine in 10 of them voted for Clinton.

White men and women alike were voting heavily for Clinton. While she has consistently dominated among white women, the two have split the allegiance of white men about equally overall, and Obama has had some strong performances with them since the Super Tuesday voting on Feb. 5.

Clinton did better than usual across virtually all categories of white voters, including those who are college graduates, earn at least $50,000 a year, independents and self-identified Democrats.
 
Pundits yesterday debated whether Mississippi was a harbinger of how the southern vote might go in November if Obama wins the nomination, or possibly the entire nation.

“Well, we’ll have to see,” Eugene Robinson, a columnist for The Washington Post, told Chris Matthews on MSNBC on Tuesday.

Robinson pointed out that while the vote may have been heavily split along racial lines in Mississippi, showing that a lot of white voters still can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man, many largely white states have supported Obama.

Mississippi is 37 percent black, and Obama won primaries in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Further, some pundits pointed out, the white votes Obama did get in Mississippi were significant.

“He picked up 27 percent (of the white vote) in Mississippi. That is critical,” said Roland Martin, an author, radio talk show host and CNN contributor, said on CNN Tuesday night.

Asked if Clinton hurt herself with voters for the long haul, particularly African-American voters, after the introduction of race and other remarks leading up to the South Carolina primary, Robinson told MSNBC's Matthews, "You could certainly make that argument in South Carolina, but going beyond South Carolina, you can't blame the rest of it on the Clintons."

Clinton lost the next 11 races after Super Tuesday because, Robinson said, "people found Obama more desirable."

“Barack Obama represents a new type of black politics,” MSNBC analyst Michelle Bernard said during the same interview with Robinson, noting that Obama successfully convinced black voters who might have been inclined early in the campaign to support Clinton that he was not just the black candidate, but a viable candidate worthy of their support.

Robinson agreed that to many people, Obama represents change.

“This is a different generation, a different way of black political leadership,” Robinson said.

He pointed out that Obama and other elected officials, including Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty are not products, by and large, of the traditional civil rights leadership, and they have found success forging support across racial lines, a success that black voters are willing to embrace.

“It’s not your father’s black America,” Robinson said.

Turnout was significantly higher than expected in Mississippi. Election officials had told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger that while turnout would be higher than the 100,000 who voted in the 2004 primary, they expected a modest increase to between 125,000 to 150,000.

More than 370,000 voters cast ballots in the Democratic primary, compared to the more than 105,000 who voted in the Republican primary, which was largely symbolic as Sen. John McCain effectively wrapped up the nomination after the Texas GOP primary, according to the Clarion-Ledger’s vote tally posted on its Web site.

And while voter turnout was big, complaints were low. As of 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, there were only 97 calls to the NAACP-BlackAmericaWeb.com Voter Alert line.

Anita Nichols, who went to see Obama Monday night at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, told The New York Times she hoped a convincing Mississippi victory would nudge Obama along in the protracted fight.

“I’m praying that he wins. I really am,” Nichols told the newspaper. “This country is ready for change, but it’s not just him. The president can only do so much, he’s got to surround himself with qualified people, and the citizens have to work, too.”

In Mississippi, the primaries are open, meaning people could cross party lines to vote.

Overall, more than six in 10 Mississippi voters voiced contentment with either Clinton or Obama as the eventual nominee, with only a bit more saying they would be satisfied with Obama. Obama was viewed as the more inspirational, the more honest and likelier to defeat McCain in November.

Obama's supporters, though, had more favorable views of Clinton than hers did of him.

Four in 10 Obama supporters said they would be satisfied if Clinton wins the nomination, while only a quarter of hers said the same about Obama. And while almost half of Obama's voters said Clinton has offered detailed plans to address the major issues, only one in five Clinton backers said the same about Obama.

On the Republican side, McCain -- who has locked up his party's nomination -- was easily carrying loyal Republicans, conservatives and white, born-again and evangelical Christians. Yet nearly one in five said they were dissatisfied with him as the nominee, while four in 10 said he is not conservative enough.

The figures came from partial samples of a survey of voters conducted for Associated Press and television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. Voters were interviewed at 35 voting places across Mississippi.

Those interviewed included 980 Democrats and 390 Republicans. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 5 percentage points for Democrats and plus or minus 7 percentage points for Republicans.