The two states are the next battlegrounds in a seesawing race to choose candidates for November’s election to succeed President George W Bush. No one in either party has claimed the role of favourite, with the first five major contests producing five different winners.

For the winners on Saturday, the prize is a fresh jolt of energy in a White House race where momentum has been short-lived.

The Republican contenders head next to Florida for its January 29 primary, while Democrats focus on South Carolina’s January 26 primary. Both parties then turn their attention to the critical February 5 “Super Tuesday” round of 22 state contests.

Huckabee, a Baptist minister who won in Iowa, has been reminding South Carolina crowds of his Southern roots and hopes to make inroads with the state’s large bloc of evangelicals, the group that fueled his rise in Iowa.

McCain, who won in New Hampshire, saw his 2000 presidential bid crippled by a bitter loss to Bush in South Carolina and spent much of the past few years trying to mend fences with his old foes in the state.

The Arizona senator ended his South Carolina campaign on Friday with an evening rally on the USS Yorktown, a decommissioned aircraft carrier docked near Charleston.

“There is no place I would rather wind up than right here on the USS Yorktown,” McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, told supporters. “This ship epitomises the service and sacrifice of many Americans in many wars.”

In Nevada, Obama and Clinton have clashed over a plan to allow voting in casino hotels on the Las Vegas Strip, approved by a federal judge on Thursday, and over Clinton’s comments on race, seen by some as a slight on civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

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