Obama projected winner in Virginia

Barack Obama looks good for a sweep of today's Democratic primaries, with TV network projections that he has won in Virginia, the most hotly contested of the three states.

With 17 percent of precincts reporting, Obama leads Hillary Clinton 61 percent to 38 percent.

Exit polls show that Obama, as he has in previous primaries, overwhelmingly won among black voters, 90 percent to 10 percent.

But he nearly evenly split among white voters in Virginia, with Clinton leading 51 percent to 48 percent. And unlike prior contests, Obama won among women, 58 percent to 42 percent.

Obama is expected to easily win in the District of Columbia and Maryland, where the polls close at 8 p.m. and where Clinton all but ceded the field.

If he does win those as well, he would run his winning streak from over the weekend to eight straight contests. Clinton is already pointing to Ohio and Texas on March 4 to keep her hopes alive.

Virginia was also the biggest battleground on the Republican side, and the race there was too close to call yet between John McCain and Mike Huckabee.

With 17 percent of precincts reporting, Huckabee leads 48 percent to 44 percent.

Exit polls show Huckabee doing well, and McCain struggling, among two key GOP constituencies.

Huckabee led 55 percent to 32 percent among self-identified conservatives, according to the preliminary results. He led by a wider margin, 66 percent to 26 percent among born-again and evangelical Christians, who made up a majority of voters in the Republican primary.