Sen. Barack Obama won decisive victories in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia in the ‘Potomac Primary.’ (Photo by Rob Carr/AP)
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LOU CHIBBARO JR
Friday, February 15, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama won handily in all of the voter precincts in the District of Columbia with large concentrations of gay voters on Tuesday as he scored landslide victories over rival Hillary Clinton in the D.C., Maryland and Virginia primaries.
In D.C., a lesbian, Kierra Johnson, and a gay man, Jerry Clark, pledged to Obama and a gay man, Peter Rosenstein, pledged to Clinton, won seats as delegates to the Democratic National Convention based on vote counts in two sections of the city designated for picking delegates.
Maggie McIntosh, a lesbian member of the Maryland House of Delegates, and H. Alexander Robinson, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a gay advocacy group, were slated as delegate candidates in Baltimore pledged to Clinton. But their chances of winning a slot as delegates remained unclear on Wednesday, as the vote count in their Baltimore districts had not been completed.
In easily winning the D.C. Republican primary, GOP presidential contender John McCain, the senator from Arizona, eliminated eight gay Republican activists who emerged as delegate candidates. Four were running as delegates pledged to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the other four ran as delegates pledged to presidential contender Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas.
Under D.C. GOP rules, the winner in the primary takes all 16 delegates allocated for the District by the Republican Party. McCain also won the Republican primaries in Maryland and Virginia.
No known gay Republicans surfaced as delegate candidates in Maryland. Virginia’s delegate selection process doesn’t begin until April.
Political activists in Washington expected Obama to win Tuesday’s primary, but many were surprised over his wide margin of victory over Clinton, who has long been a popular figure in the District.
“We expected him to win but we didn’t expect such a landslide,” said gay Obama supporter Phil Pannell, a longtime Democratic Party activist in D.C. “It was more like an avalanche.”
Pannell was referring to Obama’s victory in the D.C. Democratic primary by a margin of 75 percent to 24 percent. Obama won all of the city’s wards by margins ranging from 62 percent to 85 percent, and he appears to have won at least 139 of the city’s 142 voter precincts by margins of 57 percent or higher. The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics had not released the results of three precincts as of Wednesday.
Clinton fared better in precincts in Dupont Circle, Logan Circle and Adams Morgan — which are known to have a high concentration of gay residents — than she did in other areas of the city, such as Wards 7 and 8. But her vote totals in the gay areas did not exceed 41 percent, a development that surprised and disappointed her gay supporters, including Mario Acosta-Velez, president of the gay Gertrude Stein Democratic Club.
“We were definitely expecting Clinton to do better in those areas,” said Acosta-Velez, who lost his bid to become a Clinton delegate.
In Precinct 15, located in the heart of the Dupont Circle gay neighborhood, Obama beat Clinton by a margin of 57.6 percent to 40.9 percent. In Precinct 25 in Adams Morgan, Obama won by a 64.6 percent to 34.4 percent margin. The gays living in these precincts are mostly white.
In Precinct 127, near the Southwest D.C. waterfront, where a significant concentration of both white and black gays live, Obama beat Clinton by a margin of 73.1 percent to 25.6 percent.
Kristina Daugirclas, of Washington, holds her son Sebastian Bagley, 6 weeks, in a wrap while being passed a ballot by Ella Black, to cast her vote in D.C.’s primary at Oyster Elementary School in Washington on Tuesday. Obama was expected to win but the
margin surprised some. (Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP) |
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Obama did far better in largely black, non-gay areas in Southeast D.C., where he won many precincts by margins of greater than 85 percent, with Clinton receiving less than 15 percent of the vote.
Gay Clinton backers said they remain confident that Clinton will turn the tide by winning the upcoming Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, which would provide far more delegates than the D.C. area’s Potomac Primary.
Based on the results of the D.C. primary, gay Democratic activists Johnson and Clark are expected to win two of the eight delegate slots captured by Obama. Both ran as Obama delegate candidates in the city’s Jan. 19 pre-primary caucuses called to select delegate candidates. Rosenstein emerged on Tuesday as one of the two delegate slots that Clinton won in the primary.
Acosta-Velez lost his bid to become a Clinton delegate. Clinton would have had to win at least three delegate slots in a section of the city designated as Congressional District 1 in order for him to have secured a delegate seat.
Lesbian Democratic activist Keshini Ladduwhetty, an Obama supporter, might win a slot as an alternate delegate based on the final vote count, which won’t be released for another eight days, when absentee and challenged ballots are tallied, according to D.C. Democratic Party spokesperson David Meadows.
Meadows said more gay delegates could be added to the D.C. delegation going to the Democratic Convention in Denver through appointments made in the spring by the local Democratic committee.
Gay Democratic activists Jeffrey Richardson, vice chair of the D.C. Democratic Party, and Eric Kleinfeld, a member of the Democratic National Committee, have already been designated as super delegates representing D.C. Richardson is backing Obama and Kleinfeld is supporting Clinton.
Joshua Lynsen contributed to this article.
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