McCain wins in S. Carolina over Huckabee’s evangelical surge
COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) — Sen. John McCain was the projected winner of South Carolina’s Republican primary Saturday night despite a strong showing by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee among the evangelical Christian voters who dominated the day’s turnout.
Exit polls found self-described evangelical Christians made up nearly 60 percent of the vote, and Huckabee — an ordained Baptist minister who emphasized his conservative Christian credentials — was the choice of 40 percent of those voters. But he took only 12 percent of the nonevangelical vote, while McCain took 40 percent and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 21 percent.
McCain ran strong in the coastal Low Country around Charleston and ran even with Huckabee in the state’s inland Piedmont region, according to exit polls.
The GOP presidential contenders faced their first Southern contest in South Carolina, where voters like to point out that no one since Ronald Reagan has reached the White House without a win. Watch McCain thank supporters in South Carolina
Former Education Secretary and CNN analyst Bill Bennett said a victory in South Carolina, the first major contest in the heavily Republican South, was a must-win for the former Arkansas governor.
If he doesn’t win South Carolina, he’s not going to finish anywhere close to winning in Florida, the scene of the next major Republican contest, Bennett said.
Rain and snow were falling in some places in the state Saturday morning, while election officials in Horry County, which includes Myrtle Beach, reported a human error that put voting machines offline in 80 percent of the county’s precincts. McCain’s campaign had sought to obtain a court order to extend voting in the county by an additional hour, but was unable to do so.
Huckabee won the first contest of 2008, the Iowa caucuses, with a strong turnout from his fellow evangelicals. But he placed third in the next major contests of the race, in New Hampshire and Michigan, while coming in fifth in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, which Romney — the winner in the Michigan primary Tuesday — won easily.
Republicans named the economy as the most important issue affecting their vote in the South Carolina primary Saturday, according to early exit polling data, echoing Nevada voters in caucuses earlier in the day. And, like Nevada voters, illegal immigration was the second-most important issue.
The war in Iraq, followed by terrorism, were next, the exit polls showed. E-mail to a friend
