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By 10 pm EST most news outlets called DC, Maryland, and Virginia for John McCain on the Republican side, and Barack Obama on the Democratic one. Obama won by greater margins in all three with at least 60% of the vote. McCain won by decisive margins except in Virginia which, at an 8% margin, was at least contested.

As McCain continues his march to the nomination, Obama appears to be pulling out in front of Clinton on the other side of the process. He has now won eight contests in a row (WA, NE, LA, ME, DC, ME, VA, and the Virgin Islands) and has taken the lead in total delegates (exact numbers often vary; here are the numbers from CNN and the AP; on the right side of your screen you can see NBC’s estimates).

Here are CNN exit polls (MSNBC has not published theirs for some reason) which show Obama eating into Clinton stalwarts (i.e. in Virginia he won 45% of white women and actually won hispanic voters with 54% of their vote). This is big news going into the big Texas primary on March 4th in which 50% of Dem voters could be hispanic. I do not think that Obama could possibly win such a large block of Hispanic voters (VA’s was only 5% of the electorate) as the pattern so far is that heavier hispanic communities (such as in California and New Mexico) are much more apt to vote big for Clinton.

And so the campaign goes on with McCain poised to become the GOP nominee and needing less than 400 more delegates to clinch, while Clinton and Obama are neck and neck. Here’s what’s ahead in terms of significant delegate distribution and primaries for the tightly contested Dem nomination:

February 19: Wisconsin - 70 Delegates

March 4: Texas - 193 Delegates

Ohio - 141 Delegates

April 22: Pennsylvania - 158 Delegates

May 6: North Carolina - 115 Delegates

Indiana - 72 Delegates

May 20: Oregon - 52 Delegates

Kentucky - 51 Delegates

June 7: Puerto Rico - 55 Delegates

August 25-28: Democratic National Convention - 796 Superdelegates (currently 398 have tentatively endorsed: 242 for Clinton and 156 for Obama)

Wisconsin is likely to land in the Obama column; then come the big states. Key traits however give Clinton an initial advantage: Texas Dems are about half hispanic; Ohio and Pennsylvania both have a large amount of lower/middle class blue collar whites; on top of that, the governors of both PA and OH have endorsed Clinton. Nevertheless, Obama’s “big mo’” could be enough to nullify those factors, at least in OH and PA.

A bit further down the road, North Carolina would probably go to Obama because of the large southern black vote. Indiana has a lot of factors at play (For Hillary: its rural, and she has the endorsement of popular Sen. and ex-Gov. Evan Bayh; For Barack: its right next to his home state) so I’ll call it a tossup for now. Oregon is liberal and in the northwest so its advantage Obama. And I would gander that Kentucky and PR are advantage Hillary because of rural whites and hispanics, respectively.

Most importantly though are the Superdelegates (which Frank explains well here; also here is a link to all of the 796 Dem Superdelegates) who make up 20% of all Dem delegates. Only half so far have announced their intentions (which are subject to change), a disproportionate amount of which are higher ranking Dem Officials (Governors and Senators, for instance). There are two things important to remember about what influences unpledged Superdelegates in their decisions: (1) they are party institutionalists, which gives Clinton an obvious boost and (2) they are politicians, aka opportunists, who will wait to see which way the wind blows before they commit.

Of course those are just rough handicaps and do not take into account externalities like future momentum and events yet to be seen. Currently, Obama is the one with all the momentum in the world and is, by most measures, more likely to win the nomination. Nevertheless, unless one of the two sweeps the next three or four big states, the process could very well go all the way to the convention, where the New School will have the privilege of bringing you coverage of the first undecided national convention since 1952.

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The McCain and Obama Sweep Chesapeake Primaries by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.