Written on 5:40 PM by yahoo
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(CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic primary in Kentucky by a wide margin, CNN projects.
Sen. Barack Obama campaigns Monday in Montana, while Sen. Hillary Clinton seeks votes in Kentucky.
With 55 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton was leading Barack Obama by 28 percentage points.
According to exit polls in Kentucky, Clinton won among men, 62-32 percent, and among women, 67-27 percent.
She also beat Obama across all age groups, income groups and education levels.
Eighty-nine percent of Tuesday's voters in Kentucky were white, according to the exit polls. Among them, Clinton won 72-22 percent. Nine percent of the voters were African-American and they overwhelmingly broke for Obama, 87-7 percent.
The exit polls from Kentucky also suggest a deep division among Democrats.
Two-thirds of Clinton's supporters there said they would vote Republican or not vote at all rather than for Obama, according to the polls.
Forty-one percent of Clinton supporters said they'd cast their vote for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and 23 percent said they would not vote at all.
Just 33 percent said they would back Obama in the general election, according to the polls.
Those numbers are even worse for Obama than in West Virginia one week ago, where 36 percent of Clinton voters said they would back him in the fall.
The results come as Obama is poised to take a majority of the pledged delegates after voters weigh in Tuesday in Kentucky and Oregon.
A majority of Democrats in both states think Obama will be the party's nominee, according to exit polls.
Obama's campaign sees the two contests as a milestone in the protracted fight with Clinton, who continues to campaign hard.
"This is a very important threshold today, having the majority of pledged delegates. ... We're excited about it, but it doesn't mean it's the end," said Tom Daschle, former Senate majority leader and Obama's campaign co-chairman. Daschle called the pledged delegates "the core of the convention."
"To say that we have the majority of the core of the delegates that are going to be making the decisions at the convention and selecting our nominee, that's a critical milestone," he said.
There are 3,253 pledged delegates, and Obama, even with a poor showing Tuesday, should easily top the 1,627 delegates needed to gain a majority.
A candidate needs 2,026 delegates to win the Democratic nomination. Obama has 1,929 total delegates, while Clinton has 1,741.
The Kentucky and Oregon primaries hold 103 delegates combined. Obama needs 15 more to achieve a majority of the pledged delegates -- the delegates won either in state caucuses or primaries.
Obama is the favorite in Oregon, where a CNN poll of polls indicates that he has a lead of 10 percentage points. Oregon's primary is a mail-in only contest, which means voters must mail in or hand in their ballots in person by 8 p.m. PT. I-Reporters: Send us your voting experiences
Both Kentucky and Oregon's primaries are closed, so only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic contests.
"We still have some contests left, but if Kentucky and Oregon go as we hope, then we think we will have a majority of pledged delegates at that point, and that's a pretty significant mark," Obama said at a rally Sunday in Oregon.
"That means that after contests in every state, or almost every state and the territories, that we have received the majority of the delegates that are assigned by voters."
Obama also leads Clinton in the number of states won and in the popular vote in the primary and caucus contests this campaign season.
Obama has been careful not to declare victory in the Democratic contest, but he has focused much of his attention in recent weeks on McCain.
Obama doesn't have enough delegates to capture the nomination outright; Clinton still has a chance, if a slight one, to win the nomination if enough of the roughly 800 superdelegates were to back her.
Superdelegates are elected and party officials who have votes at the national convention. They are not bound by the primary or caucus results from the states they represent.
If the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination is almost over, Clinton isn't acting like it.
"I'm going to make [my case] until we have a nominee, but we're not going to have one today, and we're not going to have one tomorrow, and we're not going to have one the next day," Clinton said Monday in Kentucky.
She argues that she leads in the popular vote. "Right now, more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent," she said. "More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before. So we have a very close contest."
But her argument is debatable. For Clinton to claim such a lead, primary states but not caucus states -- which Obama mostly won -- would only be counted, plus the popular vote totals in Florida and Michigan.
Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates for scheduling their primaries too early, in violation of Democratic Party rules. Obama's name wasn't on the Michigan ballot, and he received no votes in that state's contest.
linton also argues that she's won the states that she contends would stack up stronger against McCain in the general election.
"The states I've won total 300 electoral votes. If we had the same rules as the Republicans, I would be nominee right now," she said. "We have different rules, so what we've got to figure out is who can win 270 electoral votes. My opponent has won states totaling 217 electoral votes."
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Written on 7:23 PM by yahoo
DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- In a sign of the increasingly bitter feud between the leading Democratic presidential contenders, Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign Monday accused John Edwards of acting like President Bush and dividing Democrats.
A student says she was told what to ask during a Clinton event in Newton, Iowa.
On Saturday, Edwards, while campaigning in Iowa, criticized the Clinton camp for planting a question in the audience, saying the practice is "what George Bush does."
"George Bush goes to events that are staged, where people are screened, where they're only allowed to ask questions if the questions are favorable to George Bush and set up in his favor," the former senator from North Carolina said.
But it is Edwards who is acting more like the sitting Republican president, the Clinton camp says.
"What George Bush does is attack Democrats and divide the country," Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said Monday. "Sen. Edwards' campaign resembles that more and more every day."
Edwards comments came after the Grinnell College's "Scarlet and Black" newspaper reported a student's account of being pulled aside before a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa, and asked to pose a specific question.
"They were canned," Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff said in an interview with the newspaper. "One of the senior staffers told me what [to ask]."
Gallo-Chasanoff said she was told the campaign wanted the question, about what Clinton would do for the environment, to be asked by a college student. She said Clinton was prompted to call on her as well as another student seen in conversation with staffers before the event.
The Clinton camp acknowledges they suggested a student ask a certain question, but said Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event.
"It was news to me," Clinton told reporters, "and neither I nor my campaign approve of that, and it will certainly not be tolerated."
A second person has also come forward saying a Clinton staffer encouraged him to ask Clinton a question at an event in Iowa this spring.
"He asked me if I would ask Sen. Clinton about ways she was going to confront the president on the war in Iraq, specifically war funding," said Geoffrey Mitchell, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. "I told him it was not a question I felt comfortable with."
No questions were taken at the event. Elleithee said the staffer "bumped into someone he marginally knew" and during a conversation with Mitchell, "Iraq came up." Elleithee denied the campaign tried to plant him as a friendly questioner in the audience.
But Mitchell said he'd never met the Clinton staffer before that event.
Edwards was not the only rival for the Democratic presidential nomination to criticize Clinton. Obama also made a subtle dig at the front-runner while campaigning in New Hampshire Monday.
"I'll let Sen. Clinton answer for her campaign," Obama told reporters. "When I go into a town hall meeting, I never know what questions to expect and that's a good thing, because the people of New Hampshire should expect that their candidates are going to hear what's on the voters' minds and not what's been concocted by the candidate's staff."
After saying that he has sometimes received questions on the campaign trail that have stumped him, Obama said planting questions is "not a practice that we've ever engaged in and it's not a practice that we ever plan to engage in."
On Saturday, another candidate, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, said, "It's not a terribly wise thing to do."
Speaking at an event in Trident Technical College, in North Charleston, South Carolina, Monday, former President Clinton said his wife could take the criticism, The Associated Press reported.
"Even though those boys have been getting tough on her lately, she can handle it," Clinton said, according to the AP.
One Iowa political science professor said he doesn't believe planted questions are a big deal, but said they provide ammunition to opponents.
"This is just one more, essentially, distraction and one more piece of a general sort of raising of questions about her competence as a campaigner," said Steffen Schmidt of Iowa State University.
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