Obama with his wife Michelle in Chicago. (Reuters)

Washington, Feb. 6: An unprecedented coalition of Asian American and Latino voters helped Hillary Clinton to beat off a challenge from Barack Obama on Super Tuesday when 24 states voted in primaries to elect Democratic and Republican nominees for the White House.

Clinton, the national front-runner for Democratic nomination until a black insurgency by Obama, won only in eight states and American Samoa against Obama’s impressive tally of 13 states last night.

Clinton’s campaign could have hit severe turbulence if she did not win in California with its biggest quota of 441 delegates to the Democratic party’s nominating national convention in August.

Asian Americans and Latinos made up 37 per cent of voters in California yesterday and they solidly lined up for Clinton, coasting her to victory in the “golden” state.

Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, a California think tank, told The Mercury News in San Jose that the California results showed the emergence of a new coalition of Latino and Asian voters.

Clinton with hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal in New York. (PTI)

US Congressman Mike Honda, vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said yesterday as voting began that “Indian-Americans like all Asian-Americans are poised to make an historic impact on Super Tuesday, especially in California, where a fifth of the nominating convention delegates are being contested, and where Asian-American voters continue to trend Democratic”.

California’s Silicon Valley alone has an estimated 300,000 Indian-Americans, who have been concerned about Obama’s remarks on the stump against outsourcing, which he repeated in his victory speech last night.

For Clinton, success in the “tri-states” of New Jersey, Connecticut and her adopted home of New York were crucial in the nomination fight.

She lost Connecticut to Obama, but Indian Americans helped tilt the balance in her favour in New Jersey and to a lesser extent in New York.

US Congressman Rob Andrews acknowledged this yesterday when he said “the Indian-American community plays a vital role in shaping our nation’s political landscape and here in New Jersey the community serves as a major force in helping to elect our governmental leaders”.

Obama won in his home state of Illinois with almost double the number of votes cast for Clinton, but her own majority in both New York and New Jersey was unimpressive and could not have been achieved without Asian American votes.

Delegate count this morning showed Clinton with 845 supporters at the national convention compared to Obama’s 765. A total of 2,025 delegates are needed to claim their nomination.

The next major string of Democratic primaries are on Saturday. On Tuesday, the national capital region of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia will pick their nominees.

The process of delegate selection is very complicated within the Democratic party, where each candidate will get support at the national convention proportional to the votes he or she received in each Congressional district in each state.

The Republican nominating process is simpler: in most states the winner takes all the delegates to the national convention from that state.

Arizona Senator John McCain described himself as the front-runner for the first time in this campaign after he surged ahead with 613 Republican delegates last night.

Among his rivals, Mitt Romney now has 269 and Mike Huckabee has 190. A total of 1,191 delegates are needed to clinch the Republican nomination. McCain had hoped to wrap up the nomination last night, but Huckabee’s victories in the conservative South has prolonged the fight among Republicans.