By JIM BARON

In the first presidential primaries in decades where Rhode Island’s results could have a chance to affect the major parties’ nominations, voters chose Sen. Hillary Clinton’s claim of experience over Sen. Barack Obama’s appeal to hope and change in the closely watched Democratic race.

Confounding pundits who predicted a tight race in a state that has been particularly friendly to the Clinton family politically, the New York senator pulled off a convincing 58 to 41 percent win over Obama with 97 percent of the precincts reporting, who had beaten her in the last 11 states where they had gone head-to-head before Tuesday night.
In the Republican primary, where Sen. John McCain completed his quest to lock in enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination for president, Rhode Island gave him a hefty 65 to 22 margin of victory over his closest competitor, former Gov. Mike Huckabee. The other candidates on the ballot were in the single digits. Congressman Ron Paul scored 7 percent, Mitt Romney, who quit the race last month nonetheless received 4 percent and Alan Keyes and Hugh Cort failed to move the needle, each winning less than 1 percent of the vote.
“We felt (good) going into today but even in Rhode Island we never expected she would win by such overwhelming numbers,” said Rhode Island Democratic Chairman William Lynch amid a raucous Clinton campaign victory celebration at McFadden’s, a Providence saloon.
“Clearly,” Lynch said, “people in Rhode Island are not paying attention so much to campaign ads and debates, but are sticking with candidates they really know and they really know Hillary Clinton. They trust her, they respect her and that is the advantage she had going into today that she has
been here so many times and has been able to meet people one-on-one and gotten to know them. The results speak volumes about how people feel about Hillary Clinton.”
Lynch, who as party chairman is a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention this summer in Denver and was, along with most of Rhode Island’s Democratic political establishment, an early Clinton supporter rejected the notion that, despite her Rhode Island win, she might have to end her campaign if she didn’t score convincing wins in both Texas and Ohio.
Clinton had a large lead in Ohio at press time, but the race in Texas was too close to call.
“This race goes on,” Lynch declared. “It’s a primary process, by our rules, for a reason. This is the reason. I don’t know why people are rushing to end the process. If there wasn’t supposed to be this process, they wouldn’t have it. And at the end of it we are going to have the strongest candidate to challenge John McCain.”
Speaking by telephone from the Obama party at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence, Caleb Weaver, Obama’s Rhode Island communications director said, “We made the Clinton campaign fight pretty hard for a state that was Clinton Country. We made a good effort in a state that was tailor-made for her.
“Tonight is all about delegates,” Weaver asserted. “If you look at the math of delegates, it will be hard for her to make up” the 160-delegate lead Obama held going into last night. “She needs big wins in Texas and Ohio.”
Whatever delegates Clinton picked up in Rhode Island, he said, will be “a wash” with Obama’s victory in Vermont.
Predictions of a heavy voter turnout for this hard-fought, historic contest — on the Democratic side either a woman or an African-American man is going to be the party’s standard bearer in November — were borne out across the state. Although communities had combined their polling places in an effort to save money in conducting the primaries, which usually see a light turnout, there were few if any serious problems reported at Rhode Island polling places.
Robert Kando, executive director of the Rhode Island Board of Elections, said there was a “fabulous turnout” despite the rain and wind that hit during the afternoon hours. Noting that there were about 40,000 votes cast in the 2004 primary and 87,000 votes cast in the 2000 primary, Kando said “I wouldn’t be surprised if we doubled the 87,000 number.
There were more than 4,000 — perhaps even more than 5,000 — mail ballot cast this year, Kando said, about three times the number of absentees than in 2004.
In Pawtucket, Kando said, there was a small hitch at one point in the day when the polling place at St. Theresa’s ran out of ballot applications,
See PRIMARY, Page A-2
but voters waited patiently, he said, remaining in line until the supply could be replenished.
Rhode Island’s unaccustomed status as a state relevant to the choosing of finalists for the presidential race in November lead to visits from all four of the major candidates – Clinton and Obama each held rallies at the Rhode Island College recreation center and McCain and Huckabee met their supporters at separate events at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick – as well as from surrogates such as wife Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry for the Illinois senator, and former President Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea for the former first lady.
TV viewers in the Ocean State were also bombarded by hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign spots for Obama and Clinton that were sprinkled among news, entertainment and sports programs in the past three weeks.
Last October, the heavily Democratic General Assembly passed legislation to move up Rhode Island’s presidential primaries to the Feb. 5 “Super Duper Tuesday” date where 24 other states held primaries or caucuses – including large states such as New York and California and Rhode Island’s neighbors Massachusetts and Connecticut.
But after canvassing officials in local cities and towns claimed they would not have enough time to prepare for the earlier date, Republican Gov. Donald Carcieri vetoed the measure, keeping March 4 the state’s primary date.