In the end, Hillary Rodham Clinton's California campaign was carried to victory by voters like Maria Hernandez of Boyle Heights, who cast her first vote for Bill Clinton and returned Tuesday to do the same for his wife.
Clinton's victory -- a romp compared with some of the predictions just before election day -- rested on the twin pillars of women and Latinos, groups that overlapped in the person of voters like Hernandez.
The campaign put up a fierce fight for women who vote by mail, calling and re-calling until they turned in their ballots. And then Clinton's aides aimed their organizational firepower at the Latino community.
The efforts paid off. Women backed Clinton 59% to 36%, contributing to a giant gender gap compared with men, who sided narrowly with Barack Obama, according to an exit poll by a consortium of news organizations.
Latinos went for Clinton by a 2-1 margin. What made that margin even more significant was that Latinos made up a record proportion of the electorate. Three in 10 of those who voted in the Democratic primary were Latino, the exit poll said, almost double the proportion in 2004.
Latino political strength has grown substantially over the last several elections in California, pushed along by the growing Latino population. In 2000, only 7% of the primary electorate was Latino, according to a Times exit poll.
The increased power can also be seen in the number of Latino elected officials in the state, many of whom endorsed Clinton and provided her with an influential base of support.
Clinton -- who had difficulty among California's non-Latino white voters, splitting them with Obama -- was hoping to press her advantage among women and Latinos in future states. Of the major states with primaries still to come, however, none but Texas, which votes March 4, has a particularly large number of Latino voters.
For Clinton, the California victory marked a reassertion of the power of a traditional campaign, after weeks in which the insurgent, if well-funded, Obama effort steadily cut into her advantage in pre-election polls.
Clinton started with an advantage among three important overlapping sectors of the Democratic Party in California: women, Latinos and voters with lower incomes. She has run well among those groups in other states, and the campaign's goal was to keep the streak going.
