With the Crikey command centre moved to the Columbia, South Carolina Holiday Inn ahead of Martin Luther King day, and out of the increasingly David Lynchesque highway motel – hard to tell whether it was the six inches of brackish water in the swimming pool that did it, the Mexican restaurant run by folks from Bangalore, or the dude in the cowboy hat sleeping in the room where the vending machines were – your correspondent has at last got the operation on a professional footing, to wit unlimited room service and three TVs set up in a pyramid, to keep tabs on the Nevada primary happening half a country away.

Nevada was widely disregarded before the primary race started, partly because it lacked the symbolic cachet of South Carolina, and also because it’s a caucus not a primary, thus delivering correspondingly weird results as people’s votes are batted back and forth in the open. The contest went live for both parties because of the split results of the earlier contests, and, for the Democrats, because the Culinary Workers Union managed to arrange workplace caucuses, with votes counting double or more. Forget the folksy-bring-a-pumpkin-pie Iowa caucus – Nevada was a casino-to-casino piece of old fashioned political combat, with shop stewards effectively trying to round up the vote and point it Obama’s way.

Actual labour movement politics is so little a part of people’s image of America – especially the nightmare kidult Disneyland of Vegas, the epicentre of the country’s self-infantilisation – that the viciousness of the fight, and especially the Clintons’ steely determination to beat back the fix, took people by surprise. But beneath all the “audacity of hope” and the “politics of meaning” guff, both parties in this fight are machine politicians – the Clintons of the south, Obama from Chicago’s southside – and they know that a certain amount of the general public appeal has to be sacrificed to getting the numbers. In the end it was Clinton wot got it, 51% to Obama’s 45%, the hard fought and public process effectively squeezing out John Edwards, to 4%.

That result is not as disastrous as it looks, since public caucuses often become de facto 2PP contests, but it ain’t good at all, and it may spell the beginning of the end of Edwards’ viability, either as a genuine third candidate, or as someone standing for a program that amounts to real social change. Edwards is a North Carolina boy, so he should get some headwind in the SC primary – but the Democrats here are substantially African-American, and the idea, even the demand, of voting for Obama on race grounds is becoming more compelling. The Republican result was a similar, if lesser, bodyslam for Romney, who had given up on South Carolina, and poured money into the desert state, gaining 51% to McCain on 13 and Huckabee on 8s.

The move acted as a face-saver for Romney who never stood a chance in SC, with an even split between foreign policy Republicans – on the “lowcountry” coast – going for McCain, and evangelicals, in the backwoods “upstate” area, preferring Huckabee. In the end McCain managed to squeak in for a necessary, but hardly compelling, win, 33% to 30%. Had he not won it, McCain’s credibility would have been in serious trouble.

Yet as it is, it is hardly a gold-standard win, since maverick candidate, former Law and Order star Fred Thompson managed to gather 16%, at least a few of them from voters that might otherwise have gone to Huckabee. McCain’s support also got a late burst when Romney quit the state, at least a tranche of McCain’s support coming in those final days. Did Mitt quit too soon, handing McCain a victory he could otherwise have stymied? The shock to the McCain campaign of a South Carolina loss would have been pretty total.

The state prides itself on having fought for the country more than any other, which is a little disingenuous – it practically seceded in 1833, the curtain raiser for what would become the Civil War. The place is still simultaneously courteous in the extreme and damn ornery, and over the next week there won’t be a small town that one or other of the four Democratic candidates (Kucinich is still running, sitting on 3%) don’t visit.

For each of them the question will be whether people are going to vote their class, or their identity – either race or gender. Newsweek editor Fareed Zakharia argues that Obama is making a bid for the middle-class vote – hence his recent conciliatory words towards Reagan’s legacy – while Clinton is occupying Edwards’ territory of the minimum-wage, unprotected service industry working class labour, the vast ocean of American working poverty. Obama is hoping to take enough of these on race grounds alone in order to stitch up a winning coalition.

For the Republicans, it’s onto Florida, another primary the Democrats aren’t bothering with. There’s only one game in the panhandle state, and it’s Rudy Giuliani’s last stand. The “Mayor of America” has made Florida his first and effectively last stand, hoping that a big win in a big state – parts of which are pretty much New York in exile – would put him in poll for Super Tuesday. Giuliani is banking in part on the fact that Florida is a closed primary, where SC was open – and the crucial part of McCain’s SC vote was independents. If the Republican right won’t get behind McCain, they are ready to nail the pro-choice Giuliani to a bit of wood. They will be praying that Romney can somehow prevail.

But the first part of that will be overshadowed by tomorrow’s Martin Luther King Day celebration, a time when much of the South indulges in the age-old festivity, the making of the excuses. Given that it’s the 40th year since his death, it will be pretty damn hard to avoid a surge of identity politics in the good ol South over the days to come.

For comprehensive coverage of the US election read Guy Rundle’s campaign trail here.