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Johnson and Herseth win with GOP crossovers
November 4, 2008 | CHET BROKAW, Associated Press

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - John McCain carried South Dakota and kept a 40-year-old GOP streak alive with support from male voters and conservatives, according to an Associated Press exit poll.

For Congress, Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson and Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin grabbed crossover votes from Republicans to win re-election.

McCain and Barack Obama each won support from roughly eight in 10 voters from his own party. But that exchange favored McCain because Republicans outnumber Democrats in South Dakota, where no Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

And while women voters split about evenly between the two presidential candidates, men favored McCain.

McCain did well with the roughly 40 percent of voters who identified themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians, getting about two-thirds of their votes.

About half the voters see themselves as moderates, and Obama won a slight majority of their votes. But among the third who are conservative, about eight in 10 supported McCain.

Inez Grenz, a retired secretary from Eureka, said she voted for McCain because she fears the economy will worsen under Obama and middle-class people will have to pay more taxes to support his proposed tax cut.

"He is a radical. He is very left," Grenz, 64, said of Obama.

But John Gonzales, a construction worker from Sioux Falls, supported the Democrat.

"We can't take another Republican. That would kill this country," Gonzales, 30, said.

"I've been in construction for like a decade, and I've never seen it this slow," he said, adding that people are buying mostly only starter and high-end homes.

Johnson won with the support of about a third of the Republican voters to win a third term in the U.S. Senate.

He is still recovering from a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed him in December 2006, campaigned very little and refused to debate Republican challenger Joel Dykstra. But Johnson won support from voters in nearly every category.

Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin also received substantial support from Republicans as the Democratic congresswoman won a third full term as South Dakota's only member of the U.S. House.

The exit poll of 977 South Dakota voters was conducted for AP by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International in a random sample of 20 precincts statewide Tuesday. The survey did not cover those who voted before Election Day in South Dakota; their vote preference and answers to other survey questions may have differed from those interviewed. The exit poll results were subject to sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, higher for subgroups.

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