Obama gets convincing wins in 3 states

The successes come just as Obama is building a strong advantage over Clinton in raising money, providing important fuel for the nominating contests ahead. Still, the results were expected to do little to settle the muddle in the delegate race that resulted after the wave of contests last Tuesday in which the two candidates split up states from coast to coast.

In Republican contests on Saturday, Mike Huckabee won in Kansas, an embarrassing setback for Senator John McCain as he tries to rally the party around him as the nominee. While Obama had been expected to win the contests on Saturday, the margin of victories were surprising, particularly in Nebraska and Washington, which offered the day's biggest trove of delegates. In both states, he captured 68 percent of the vote in caucuses, compared with Clinton's roughly 32 percent.

The nominating fight now turns to Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, which hold their primaries on Tuesday. Obama is considered well positioned in those states.

On Saturday, with the contest so close, excitement ran high, as did turnout. In Nebraska, The Omaha World-Herald reported that organisers at two caucus sites had been so overrun by crowds that they abandoned traditional caucusing and asked voters to drop makeshift scrap-paper ballots into a box instead. In Sarpy County, in suburban Omaha, traffic backed up on Highway 370 when thousands of voters showed up at a precinct where organizers had planned for hundreds.

In Washington, the Democratic party reported record-breaking numbers of caucusgoers, with early totals suggesting turnout would be nearly double what it was in 2004--itself a record year--when 100,000 Democrats caucused. Clinton's advisers had predicted she might not win any of the contests in February, and said she was looking ahead to March 4, when voters in Rhode Island and particularly Ohio and Texas will decide the next big bloc of delegates.

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