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| Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama D-Ill., smiles as he stops at Buck's Restaurant for breakfast in Greenville, Miss. Tuesday, March 11, 2008. |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sen. Barack Obama picked up five more delegates than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Mississippi's Democratic primary Tuesday.
Obama won 19 delegates and Clinton 14, according to an analysis of returns by The Associated Press.
Obama won the primary with more than 60 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns. But Clinton was able to hold down Obama's delegate gains by winning one of the state's four congressional districts. Obama carried the other three.
Obama's victory added to his lead in the race for delegates to the party's national convention. Overall, Obama had 1,598 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,487, according to the AP count.
It takes 2,025 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination at the party's national convention this summer.
On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain clinched the nomination last week.
The AP tracks the delegate races by calculating the number of national convention delegates won by candidates in each presidential primary or caucus, based on state and national party rules, and by interviewing unpledged delegates to obtain their preferences.
Most primaries and some caucuses are binding, meaning delegates won by the candidates are pledged to support that candidate at the national conventions.
Political parties in some states, however, use multistep procedures to award national delegates. Typically, such states use local caucuses to elect delegates to state or congressional district conventions, where national delegates are selected. In these states, the AP uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support at the caucus doesn't change.
