Hillary Clinton said Wednesday her victory over rival Barack Obama in Pennsylvania showed she had the broad support needed to recapture the White House for Democrats in November's presidential election.
Latest official figures from Tuesday's Pennsylvania contest pared back the margin of her victory slightly, but she could still claim a strong win as the two took their increasingly negative battle into its final states. Obama emerged from the latest, and most acrimonious, bout in the state-by-state contest still holding a narrow lead in popular votes and in delegates who select the party's nominee at its August convention.
"I've won the states we have to win - Ohio, now Pennsylvania," Clinton told CNN. "If you look at the broad base of support that I have accumulated it really is the foundation on which we build our victory come the fall."
The Pennsylvania Department of State said that with more than 99.1 percent of the vote counted Clinton was beating Obama by 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent. Earlier figures had showed a margin of about 10 percent.
The win paid immediate dividends for the cash-strapped New York senator, who said she took in $3 million in the following hours. Both candidates immediately looked to the next round of contests on May 6 in North Carolina, where Obama is favoured, and Indiana, which is considered a toss-up. Clinton survived a heavy advertising onslaught in Pennsylvania by Obama, who outspent her by more than 2-to-1.
In television interviews on Wednesday, Clinton brushed off suggestions that she was running a negative campaign. She dismissed an editorial in The New York Times which called on her to acknowledge that "the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election." "That's part of campaigns, and you know it goes back and forth. That's the way campaigns are," she said.
The contest in Pennsylvania, where 158 delegates were at stake, opened the final phase of the Democratic duel for the right to face Republican John McCain. Nine more contests are scheduled before the voting ends on June 3. Obama, who narrowed a 20-point Clinton lead in opinion polls before falling short, already was looking ahead.
He left Pennsylvania before the polls closed for an evening rally in Indiana. "There were a lot of folks who didn't think we could make this a close race when it started," Obama said in Evansville. "Six weeks later, we closed the gap. We rallied people of every age and race and background to our cause."
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