Potomac primary results thread: Obama sweeps, Huckabee fails to complete late Virginia surge

9:45pm: Obama is giving a stump speech of his own from Madison, Wisconsin. After today's margins, Obama could very well make March 4th irrelevant by another comfortable victory in Wisconsin next week, so Clinton better pay attention to next week's primaries.
And DC was called for McCain.

9:30pm: Polls close in Maryland, and John McCain and Barack Obama are projected to win that state as well, sweeping the Potomac primary. Obama's margin of victory in Maryland appears to be just as big as in Virginia, which should allow Obama to increase his delegate lead. Just as Saturday, Obama managed to outperform the already high expectations.

9:25pm: Hillary Clinton is giving a stump speech from El Paso, Texas, as if this was not an election night. Her point is obvious: Ohio and Texas are what matters. But NBC's Chuck Todd is projecting a margin of about 20 delegates out of Virginia, and that should make it increasingly hard for Clinton to catch up in terms of pledged delegates, even with March 4th wins -- though she could potentially say she is ahead in the popular vote. (Note that a new Wisconsin poll that I will blog about more later has a close race, with Obama up 4%.)

8:35pm: Virginia is called for John McCain, who takes all 60 delegates. The outstanding precincts were in McCain strongholds, making it impossible for Huckabee to catch up. This is a huge relief for the McCain camp. They will have to explain why they once again so stunningly lost the conservative vote, but this was the last chance Huckabee had of prolonging the race.

8:30pm: Exit polls show Obama getting 90% of the black vote in Virginia, which appears to be his highest share in any primary yet. The GOP race has now been stable for a while, now a 3,000 vote gap. Fairfax County has not reported at all yet.

8:15pm: DC is called for Barack Obama. None of these wins are surprising in any way, but their accumulation is nevertheless impressive. In Virginia, there is now 1,100 votes separating McCain and Huckabee with 38% of the vote in. Remember, if McCain wins by one vote, he gets all of the state's delegates.

8:00pm: With 24% reporting in Virginia, McCain just pulled narrowly ahead 47% to 45% (a 800 vote lead). Northern Virginia is just starting to come in, however, while Huckabee's strongholds in Southern Virginia are almost fully in.

7:40pm: With 7% reporting, Huckabee is ahead 51% to 42%, though keep in mind that McCain areas tend to report later than Huckabee areas (remember Missouri and Louisiana). On the Democratic side, Obama is up 62% to 37%.

7:30pm: The second update of exit polls now show a toss-up between Huckabee and McCain, a stunning result in and of itself, no matter who ends up winning. McCain was up 30% in polls taken on Friday, up 10% in polls taken over the past 48 hours, and now seems to have fallen down into a tie. The apparent size of Obama's victory also hints at a possible explanation, as many moderate Republicans and independents might have crossed-over to vote for Obama instead of McCain (the inverse of what happened in New Hampshire).

Original post: The polls closed at 7pm in Virginia and the networks wasted no time before calling Virgina for Barack Obama. No surprise there, but the size of the victory looks to be bad news (yet again) for Hillary Clinton. The first exit polls hint at Obama breaking the 60% threshold, with a big delegate margin coming out of that.

The GOP's Virginia race has not been called yet and remember that 60 delegates hang in the balance, winner-take-all. The first exit polls have McCain up in single-digits, so this could potentially be a long night.