Showing a little more class than Obama last week when he lost Nevada, Hillary Clinton released a statement saying she called Obama to congratulate him.

"I have called Senator Obama to congratulate him and wish him well.

"Thank you to the people of South Carolina who voted today and welcomed me into their homes over the last year. Your stories will stay with me well beyond this campaign and I am grateful for the support so many of you gave to me.

"We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the twenty-two states as well as American Samoa who will vote on February 5th.

"In the days ahead, I’ll work to give voice to those who are working harder than ever to be heard. For those who have lost their job or their home or their health care, I will focus on the solutions needed to move this country forward. That’s what this election is about. It’s about our country, our hopes and dreams. Our families and our future."

Hillary says it's on to Florida and the Feb. 5 states. Keep in mind, Florida is different than Michigan because all three candidates are on the ballots, regardless of whether their delegates get seated or not.

Bill Clinton is speaking now in Missouri and also congratulates Obama. He says Obama won fair and square but now it's on to the states with the big numbers.

NBC is not being honest when it discusses what the polls expected for Obama in relation to the white vote. As I posted earlier today, the NBC-Mason Dixon poll was an outlier. Every other poll projected Obama getting approximately 20% of the white vote and it appears that is what he did. And indeed, the M-D poll blew the margin in this race by a hefty margin. Every other poll had Obama winning in a blowout.

Incredible. Barack Obama just wins the primary in South Carolina and less than an hour after the polls close, CNN switches to cover an endorsement of McCain and a speech by him.

Is that a sign of the lack of importance the media gives to South Carolina?

I may not be an Obama supporter, but this is insulting.

Beginning now, Big Tent Democrat and I are live-blogging the South Carolina Primary results and the media coverage of them. I'll be concentrating on the results and the demographics and electoral storylines. Big Tent will focus on the media coverage.

We're using a new platform, I described it here, and to make it wider, I've put it below the fold. Just click on the "there's more" link and join us. If you want to come back to it, here's the permalink for you to bookmark.

Here we go. [More...]

Here are some early exit-polling results:

Interviews with voters as they left their polling places indicated about half the electorate was black. Half the voters said the economy was the most important issue in the race. About one quarter picked health care. And only one in five said it was the war in Iraq....

Roughly half the voters said former President Clinton's campaigning for his wife was very important to their choice.

The exit poll was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for The Associated Press and the networks.

More exit poll results here.

Via Taylor Marsh, Media Matters has Craig Crawford's terrific appearance on MSNBC this morning:

CRAWFORD: You know, I have sat down here in Florida for the last month. And I have watched the coverage, and I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney [Spears], he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club. I mean, we've gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, "Well, where's the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign?" you're accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons. I mean, I think if somebody came out today and said that Bill Clinton -- if the town drunk in Columbia [South Carolina] came out and said, "Bill Clinton last night was poisoning the drinking water in Obama precincts," the media would say, "Ah, there goes Clinton again. You can't trust him." I really think it's a problem. You know what? You guys make him stronger with this bashing. This actually is what makes the Clintons stronger.

Amen Craig. Amen.

I have knocked Josh Marshall around more than a bit of late, I thought with reason, but we all like and respect Josh and can not say enough about the good things he has done for the progressive blogosphere. That is why it gives me great pleasure to highly recommend his most recent post about his qualms about what Bill Clinton has been doing in this campaign. I have some disagreement with his analysis but it is worthy of thoughtful engagement. A very good and interesting post.

Big Tent Democrat and I are going to try something new tonight. We have new software for live-blogging. It's much faster and we can do it together without fear of erasing the other's comments. Readers can also submit comments to us while we're live-blogging and we can include some in the live-blog. You can also comment as usual in the comments.

When we go live, at 6:30 pm ET, you may want to bookmark the permalink (the link that says "there's more...permalink...comment" )because the live blog will appear in the "more" section so that it can be wider than the front page allows.

This is just a reminder thread. It's an experiment, we'll see how it goes! Tips for readers are below. (Link here if you want to know more.).

Update: You can still comment and have your own conversation going in the comment thread to the live-blog thread as always. The tips below are just for those who would like us to include their comment in the actual live-blog part. In other words, there are two ways to submit comments. [More....]

Both Hillary and Obama have been courting the youth vote in South Carolina. Here's the numbers:

The stakes are high for the candidate who can mobilize the 612,000 eligible South Carolina voters younger than 29.

Last Saturday's GOP primary drew 44,000 young voters, according to exit polls. That was only 10 percent of the total turnout of 443,000. In contrast, 35 percent of the Republican voters last Saturday were over age 60. That trend relegated Mike Huckabee, who blitzed college campuses last week, to second place behind John McCain, who won with older voters.

According to the Secretary of State, there are 2,246,242 registered voters in South Carolina in 2,048 precincts. In the 18 to 24 age group, there are 216,877 voters -- in the 25 to 45 age group, there are 738,704 voters. These numbers include Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

So, there are almost a million voters under age 45. By contrast, there are more than 1.5 million registered voters over age 45.

In the 2004 presidential primary, 184,288 voted in the Democratic primary.

a TPM e-mailer:

Nothing Hillary says can actually browbeat her rivals, so nothing she says now has any direct bearing on whether those delegates are seated or not. As you said, there's little doubt that delegates from FL and MI will be seated in one way or another. If Hillary wins without them, she'll seat them. If Obama wins by an ample margin, he will play generous and seat them. If he wins by a narrow margin, some other process such as caucuses will be ginned up to seat pro-Obama delegations. So why did Hillary raise the question at all?

I speculate that she raised it for one purpose only - to heighten the profile of the Florida Dem primary on Tuesday. Hillary will almost certainly lose SC today . . . She wants the FL win, not the SC loss, to be what resonates through the echo chamber during the week leading up to Super Tuesday.

More....

It's almost a given that Barack Obama will win in South Carolina. How much does the vote matter? The Wall St. Journal reports:

But with expectations set so high, political pundits say the Illinois senator faces a dilemma: He will have to win by a double-digit margin in order for voters nationwide to perceive South Carolina as a real victory.

Up for grabs for S.C. Dems today: 54 delegates, including 45 committed and 9 super delegates.

Two graphics that explain today and Feb. 5, below:

regarding Barack Obama:

Obama is absolutely right that we stand at a time of historic possibility for fundamental change-if anything, he under-estimates how much this is so.

He is also absolutely right that he is the perfect figure to lead us in a new direction. He doesn't have a lot baggage, he is someone that young people can identify with, he is not deeply embedded in a Washington culture that is far removed from the real pulse of the country. But...

Obama is absolutely wrong in his fundamental political analysis. The problem in America today is not a polarized political system in which Democrats and liberals are as equally to blame as Republicans and conservatives. The problem is a political system that's dominated by this sort of brain-dead political narrative. And the longer that Obama promulgates such brain-dead political narratives, the more he squanders his enormous potential. . . .

Read the whole thing. Rosenberg speaks for me on this.