WASHINGTON, 14 February 2008 — Barack Obama’s victories in Virginia and Washington DC Tuesday night offered the strongest evidence yet that the race for the Democratic nomination is slipping away from Hillary Clinton.

The scale of Obama’s victories, as well as signs that he is expanding his support into a broader-based coalition, exposed growing problems for Hillary. With Tuesday night’s performances, Obama began for the first time to bite into Hillary’s support base. That could siphon crucial support ahead of key contests next month, which her campaign team is already projecting as her last stand.

Obama Tuesday night registered his strongest performance so far among white voters — without giving up his dominance among African-American voters. He also, for the first time, began to make huge inroads with the constituencies Hillary could normally take for granted: White women and working class households at the bottom of the economic ladder.

In the Republican race, the primaries confirmed the problems that John McCain has with his party base. While he is still on course to secure — eventually — the Republican nomination, exit polls suggested the contest in Virginia and DC was too close to call with Mike Huckabee.

This is a huge embarrassment for McCain, coming after he lost two contests — Louisiana and Kansas — to Huckabee at the weekend.

In Virginia, about 46 percent of those voting in the Republican race described themselves as Christian evangelicals. Of these, roughly 70 percent voted for Huckabee, a Baptist pastor. Many other Republicans voted for Huckabee as a protest against McCain, who is viewed as too moderate.

McCain, the senator for Arizona, has angered Republicans because he voted against tax cuts introduced by President George Bush and because he has shown a willingness to work alongside Democrats in the Senate.

After Mitt Romney pulled out of the Republican race last week, McCain declared himself to be the frontrunner. But Huckabee is spoiling McCain’s coronation by refusing to get off the stage, and is emerging as the champion of the right-wing talk-show hosts who are highly influential among Republicans. Clinton’s team was braced for Tuesday night’s defeats but the breakdown of the figures was worse than they could have anticipated. In a crucial blow to Hillary, exit polls suggested that she had failed to win over the blue-collar voters who had previously supported John Edwards before his withdrawal from the Democratic race last month. Those votes are now going to Obama instead.

That was an indication that Obama, for the first time, had managed to broaden a coalition that, while piling up a string of victories in small states, could also compete on equal footing with Hillary in traditional Democratic strongholds.

Obama’s coalition, until Tuesday night, was built around African-Americans and young people, as well as high-income and highly educated white people. Tuesday night, he matched her — and, in some cases, took a larger share of the vote — among white women and men and among the poor.

In Virginia, exit polls showed, as expected, that Obama won 90 percent of African-Americans, who accounted for 33 percent of the Democratic voters. But Obama and Hillary split the white vote: He took 48 percent of the white vote while she took 50 percent. This contrasted with earlier contests in some of the southern states in which he only succeeded in taking about 10 percent of the white vote.

Obama attracted some of the largest turnouts yet for his rallies in DC, Maryland and Virginia — about 17,000 at one on Monday night. As usual, the majority of these were young, and exit polls confirmed the almost messianic support he attracts among that age group. He took 80 percent of the vote among under-25s to her 20 percent.

Significantly, he beat Hillary by 59 percent to 40 percent among those earning less than $50,000. Until now, that constituency had split between Hillary and Edwards, until he left the race. In Maryland, the exit polls showed much the same pattern, with the white vote split between them, with Obama taking 47 percent to Hillary’s 49 percent.

The votes Tuesday night gave him a substantial advantage in the battle for delegates who could decide the nomination at the party convention in Denver in August. Under the proportional system used by the Democrats, Obama will take the lion’s share of Virginia’s 83 delegates, DC’s 15 and Maryland’s 70.