February 05, 2008	Tuesday	Muharram 26, 1429

WASHINGTON, Feb 4: The race for the White House further tightened on Monday, hours before the national primary begins when as many as 24 states choose Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential election.

But no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the party has already achieved a new milestone in US history: American voters for the first time will have the choice to elect a woman or an African-American to the White House.

In the Republican camp, Vietnam veteran, Senator John McCain, has maintained a gradual lead over other candidates. But the race for the Democratic nomination got sharper during the last 24 hours with Barack Obama steadily eroding Hillary Clinton’s lead in initial surveys.

As many as four polls, released during the last 24 hours, show Senator Obama progressing gradually among Democratic voters.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows Mrs Clinton losing a comfortable national lead she’s held for months over Mr Obama and other rivals.

Mr Obama, who trounced Mrs Clinton in January’s South Carolina primary, garnered 49 per cent of registered Democrats in Monday’s poll, while Senator Clinton trailed by just three points, a gap well within the survey’s 4.5 percentage point margin of error.

A CBS News poll finds Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama tied at 41 per cent each.

A Pew Research Centre poll shows Senator Clinton with a wider lead -- 46 per cent to 38 per cent -- over Senator Obama. However, in a similar poll taken in mid-January, Mrs Clinton led 46 per cent to 31 per cent.

A USA Today/Gallup poll shows Mr Obama wiping out Senator Clinton’s double-digit national lead just before coast-to-coast contests on Tuesday. Forty-five per cent of Democratic voters polled for this survey favour Mrs Clinton while 44 per cent back Mr Obama at 44.

The Feb 5 primary, always held on the first Tuesday of February, is also known as Super Tuesday because more than half of the nation participates in the nomination process on that day. Usually, the Super Tuesday settles the nomination dispute and the candidates then focus on the presidential vote, which is scheduled for Nov 4.

But commentators appearing in various US TV news shows on Monday, predicted that this year’s contest for the Democratic slot may linger on.

“We may actually not get an answer for weeks if not months,” to the question of who will win the Democratic nomination, said ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “It could go on for a very long time if Obama upsets Clinton in two states especially, Missouri and California.”

“It is not the end … it is perhaps the beginning of the end,” said CNN, paraphrasing Winston Churchill words.

The New York Times quoted aides to Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama as saying that “they now believe that their contest, unlike the Republicans, could extend well beyond the multi-state contests on Tuesday.”

Almost all media outlets credited Mr Obama’s intense and effective campaigning for eroding Mrs Clinton’s national lead over him.

Under the nomination procedure, the race isn’t over until a candidate gets a majority of delegates, and both parties have rules that make it difficult to get to a majority.The Democratic rules award delegates proportional to the vote, so if a candidate gets 40 per cent of the vote, he or she gets 40 per cent of the delegates.

Thus the candidate who comes in second will continue to amass delegates. The candidate who comes in first has to win by overwhelming margins in order to get to a majority quickly.

That seems less and less likely as crushing victories by either Mrs Clinton or Mr Obama don’t seem to be in the cards. The Republican race still has three major candidates, each of whom has won at least one state.

Mike Huckabee is likely to win delegates in states and districts where evangelical voters predominate. A three-way split makes it harder for a Republican candidate to build a majority.

Some conservative activists have already signalled an interest in trying to stop Senator McCain in the late primaries. His biggest competition is Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.