No surprise here, but Hillary Clinton is declaring victory in the West Virginia primary. Right now, the margin looks to be about 63-to-30-percent. Check out results here.

Polls and even Obama himself had long predicted a blowout for Clinton in this state. Polls showed Clinton ahead by as much as 36 percentage points.

This is, nonetheless, a small win. West Virginia is the 37th largest state and has only 39 delegates - not enough make up for the 163-delegate lead that Obama has developed.

Clinton is also heavily favored in Kentucky’s May 20 primary.

MSNBC and CNN are both reporting that Barack Obama has likely won the Democratic primary in North Carolina.

As soon as the news broke, about 100 of Obama’s volunteers gathered at Opie Taylor’s began screaming, cheering and chanting “Yes We Can.”

Zennie and I hit a couple key polling spots around town and found they were surpisingly empty. At the Justice Center, Chief Deputy Clerk and Election Supervisor Jessica White said 77,000 people are registered in Monroe County and election officials just began sifting through 10,000 absentee ballots.

SPEA grad student and election volunteer Stephanine Davis is one of the people counting absentee ballots today. This is the first time she’s been involved in election tabulating, but she’s excited to be involved.

Acoording to White and an associate, this is how the absentee ballots work.

There are 10,000 absentee ballots to be counted and they don’t all have to tabulated by the time polling stations close at 6 p.m. All 10,000 may not be counted unless the winning margins are slim. The counted absentee ballots are not added to the grand total of votes until all the precincts in the county are counted.

A new poll released Friday has Barack Obama leading his opponent, Hillary Clinton, by five percentage points in the race for Indiana’s Democratic presidential primary voters.
A survey of about 575 likely Democratic voters showed that 50 percent prefer Obama, an Illinois senator, while 45 percent said they prefer Clinton, a senator from New York. Five percent of the surveyed Democrats were undecided. The results fall within a 4.2 percent margin of error.

The poll also asked likely general election voters (Republicans, Democrats and independents) about a match up between presumptive Republican nominee John McCain and the two Democratic candidates. McCain beats them both. The Arizona senator leads Obama 51 percent to 44, with 5 percent undecided. Clinton trails McCain by 11 percentage points, with 5 percent who haven’t yet made up their minds. The margin of error for this poll is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

The survey was conducted between April 14 and 16 by SurveyUSA. It was commissioned by the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne.