Curiouser and curiouser!

Another overwhelmingly white state backed Hillary Clinton with a landslide victory early today.

The former First Lady won by as much as 30 points in Kentucky just a week after she trounced Barack Obama by 41 per cent in West Virginia.

Seven in ten white Kentucky voters sided with Mrs Clinton, according to exit polls.

The carbon copy triumph in a southern state dominated by rural, low income families once again highlights fears that Mr Obama has failed to win over key white voters.

But it did little to dent the Illinois senator's almost invincible lead in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination.

Mr Obama was confident of sharing the primary spoils with a decisive win in Oregon when the results are counted this morning.

Although the north-western state has a largely white demographic, the better educated voters fell into his core support group – a fact underlined by the record 75,000 crowd that turned up to hear him speak in the state at the weekend.

The latest results rolled in as Mr Obama's bid to become America's first black president won support from a most unlikely quarter –- a 90-year-old senator who was once a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

Robert Byrd was an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement and was against integrating the U.S. military.

He was also a recruiter and leading member of the Ku Klux Klan, the race hate group that hid behind sinister cone masks and white robes to terrorise blacks in America's deep south.

But the longest-serving senator in history later renounced his racist views after his teenage grandson died in a 1982 road crash.

'The death of my grandson caused me to stop and think,' he said, adding he came to realise that black people love their children as much as he does his.

As late as 2001, however, he referred to "white niggers" in a newspaper interview, then promptly apologised when his words caused a storm of protest.

The Democrat elder statesman publicly endorsed Mr Obama yesterday, calling him a 'shining young statesman', despite his home state of West Virgnina backing Mrs Clinton in last week's primary.