Racial split in Louisiana’s Democratic primary

She also won the oldest voters, but Obama had the advantage among not just voters under age 30 — where he usually is strong — but all the way up to age 65. Race may have played a role in this too — it appeared most younger voters were black while seven in 10 older voters were white.

There was little difference in Louisiana in how votes split for Obama and Clinton among moderates and voters farther left.

A huge ideological divide remained in the Republican primary, however. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dropped out of the race last week after McCain amassed an all but insurmountable lead for Republican convention delegates in Super Tuesday contests.

But questions remain about the Arizona senator's ability to energize the GOP's conservative base, and on Saturday it appeared most of Romney's most conservative support had gravitated to Huckabee.

As usual, close to half of Louisiana GOP voters called themselves very conservative. They favored Huckabee over McCain by 2-to-1. Without competition from Romney, Huckabee had his best showing to date among the very conservative, with the exception of his home state of Arkansas on Super Tuesday.

McCain was backed by at least three in 10 very conservative voters, about 10 points better than he's done on average in primaries to date, but Huckabee doubled his past support among that group.

As in earlier contests, Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was the strong favorite of white evangelicals _ half the GOP electorate in Louisiana — and the one in three who attend religious services more than once a week.

McCain and Huckabee split those who called themselves somewhat conservative, while McCain, as usual, ran strongly among moderates and the one in 10 GOP voters who called themselves liberal.

Huckabee ate into one typically strong McCain group — those who say the most important candidate quality is that he "says what he believes." One in five voters said that was the top quality and Huckabee won at least as many of their votes as McCain did.

Huckabee was even stronger among the nearly one-half who said it was most important that a candidate shares their values. McCain won at least eight in 10 of the roughly 20 percent whose top quality was the candidate's experience and the 10 percent who cited electability.

The results were from samples of 1,169 Democratic primary voters and 647 Republican primary voters conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International in 30 precincts across Louisiana on Saturday. Results were subject to a sampling error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points for the Democratic primary and 6 points for the Republican.

Picking the president: The candidates Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed. John McCain                Barack Obama

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