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Big wins, no knockouts. That's the bottom line for both Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain after the Super Tuesday contests. They are now the strong front-runners in their parties. Both face tough problems in trying to sew up their nominations and rally their parties behind them.

The results in the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries show a continuing split in the party's vote: a total of 7.4 million for Clinton and 7.3 million for Obama. CNN estimates as of 5 p.m. Wednesday indicate that Clinton and Obama are fairly close in the number of delegates each has won to date (818 for Clinton, 730 for Obama).

The primaries exposed some important divisions within the Democratic Party. According to the TV networks' exit polling in the 16 states that had Democratic primaries on Super Tuesday, African-Americans backed Obama, 82 percent to 17 percent. If Clinton wins the nomination, she will have to reach out to black voters in some dramatic way. The pressure will be intense for her to put Obama on the ticket, a prospect that drew rousing cheers from the audience at the recent Democratic debate in Los Angeles.

However, white voters in the Democratic primaries were not the mirror image of blacks.Clinton carried the white vote (53 percent), but Obama's share was a solid 40 percent. There is a racial division in the party, but not racial polarization.

The gender gap is also conspicuous. Women voted for Clinton, 53 percent to 42 percent. Men preferred Obama, 50 percent to 44 percent.What made the women's vote decisive was that 57 percent of Democratic primary voters on Super Tuesday were female. Attracting male voters to a ticket headed by Clinton could be another problem for Democrats.

Obama also did well among high-income, well-educated liberals who have a taste for his idealistic "post-partisan" style. Anything that reminds them of the "Clinton wars" of the 1990s is a turnoff -- very likely including Bill Clinton himself. When Democrats were asked which candidate would do the better job of uniting the country, Obama ran ahead of Clinton, 50 percent to 39 percent.

Upscale Democrats include many passionate anti-war voters. Democrats who said that the war in Iraq was their top concern voted for Obama over Clinton, 53 percent to 42 percent. Uniting the party would likely require Clinton to make her anti-war positions even firmer.

McCain appears to be a more secure front-runner than Clinton. McCain led by a bigger margin among Republican primary voters who went to the polls on Super Tuesday. They gave 39 percent of their vote to McCain, 31 percent to Mitt Romney, and 20 percent to Mike Huckabee.McCain also has a bigger delegate lead than Clinton. (He has 680, compared with 270 for Romney and 176 for Huckabee, CNN estimates.) McCain's edge is larger partly because Republicans allow winner-take-all primaries, such as those in New York, New Jersey, Missouri, Arizona, and Connecticut -- states that McCain won.

But McCain still faces a big problem: conservatives.He won state after state without carrying a majority of conservatives, who are his party's base. In the combined exit poll, conservatives voted 42 percent for McCain, 30 percent for Romney, and 21 percent for Huckabee. McCain's good fortune is that Romney and Huckabee split the conservative vote. Southern conservatives went for Huckabee; other conservatives went for Romney.

The split allowed McCain to win by dominating the moderate vote. Ironically, McCain won Republicans who favor abortion rights even though he is staunchly opposed to such rights.He also won anti-war Republicans even though he is a fervent supporter of President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq.

McCain is facing the conservative movement that has dominated the Republican Party since the rise of Ronald Reagan.For McCain, defeating Romney and Huckabee will not be enough. He must prove to wary conservatives that he embraces their movement.

And as Vernon Jordan, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, warned Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday, "It's not easy to run against a movement." That certainly describes Clinton's predicament. Obama is the leader of a passionately committed movement that looks to him to deliver the country from the politics of the past -- a past that includes Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush.