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As is customary on such nights, the main candidates vying for votes on Super Tuesday strode to their podiums in hotel ballrooms across the country to interpret the night’s results for their adoring crowds.

Such speeches are invariably billed as “victory” speeches, despite the fact that only one candidate is truly entitled to the phrase. But the amazing thing about Tuesday night — a perfect expression in microcosm of this hurly-burly election — is that four of the five major candidates had earned the right to proclaim victory. For Democrats, the 22-state slugfest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ended virtually in a draw. He won more states, and she took a small lead in the delegate count; but both could walk away from the results plausibly claiming victory and momentum.

The Republican result was equally fascinating. John McCain won — and yet he didn’t. He carried nine states, including most of the big ones. Since the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, award delegates mostly on a winner-take-all basis (the Democrats split them proportionally), Mr. McCain collected many delegates. Barring a calamity, he will be the Republican nominee.

Yet, if you looked at a map of the results, you noticed a band of states across the mid-south, deep south, and mid-Atlantic that bore the colour of another contender. Those five states — Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia — went for the former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee.

Those five states represented Mr. Huckabee victories, enabling him once again to stay in the race. But more to the point they exposed Mr. McCain’s festering problem.

Saturday will bring the Republican caucus in Kansas — you know, Kansas, as in What’s the Matter With. The Kansas GOP is under the near-total ownership of the Christian right. Will this be another Mr. Huckabee win/McCain rebuke?

In sum, the Republicans have a clear frontrunner, one who will be their nominee, but who is actively loathed by key players in his party.

On the Democratic side, there is little such loathing. But there is tension, and a brewing distrust between supporters of Ms. Clinton, who see her as so obviously the more qualified candidate, and the backers of Mr. Obama. Here’s an interesting anomaly: Mr. Obama does well in white ex-urban and rural areas.

So Mr. Obama has a reach beyond the hardcore Democratic white constituencies. But he still doesn’t connect to working-class voters. I think the bigger challenge moving forward is Mr. Obama’s. He does need to add more kitchen-table economics to his speeches and give working-class voters a clearer sense that all this “change” will bring them specific and tangible good things. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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