Hillary Clinton can bank on the support of women. Conservatives will never trust John McCain. Southern white men won't vote for Barack Obama.

All were conventional wisdom before this year's presidential contests began, and the voters shot some holes in each.

Now that Democrats and Republicans in most states have voted, the candidates' strengths and weaknesses have come into focus. With showdowns in Texas and Ohio next week that could determine whether Clinton stays in the Democratic race, here is what exit polls of voters reveal about the contenders' supporters:

Clinton's problem with women

Women favor Clinton, the New York senator, but not by much. She leads Obama among females by 51 percent to 45 percent. Of 22 states that have held Democratic primaries in which the candidates competed fully, she won the women's vote in just half.

Her true strength is with white women. She has a 21 percentage-point edge with them and has carried them in most states. But underscoring Clinton's recent fade, she has barely won majorities of white women in recent contests in Wisconsin and Virginia.

Two-thirds of Hispanic women support Clinton. Black women, who some thought might be torn between Clinton and Obama, favor the black Illinois senator by about the same margin that black men do — eight in 10.

McCain and conservatives

Only a third of conservatives have supported McCain, whose views on immigration, tax cuts, campaign finance and federal judgeships have antagonized them. That's still more than have backed his remaining major rival, Mike Huckabee, and only a few points behind Mitt Romney, who bowed out of the race early this month.

The Arizona senator's real problem is with the GOP's most conservative voters. Only one-fifth of people calling themselves very conservative have voted for McCain, and he hasn't prevailed among them in a single state.

Yet these most conservative voters are only 28 percent of those who have voted so far in Republican contests. They're outnumbered by the 35 percent who say they are somewhat conservative. McCain is easily the leading vote-getter with that group. And the very conservative are equal in size to the party's moderates, a group McCain leads overwhelmingly.

In another reflection of the right's views, Republicans in Virginia who listen frequently to conservative talk radio were 22 points less likely to support McCain than those who never listen. The gap was 13 points in Maryland, but in Wisconsin there was virtually no difference. Combining those same three states, voters were evenly split over whether McCain is conservative enough.

White men jump to support Obama

Obama leads Clinton among all men nationally by a dozen points and edges her by 4 points among white men.

He's even been competitive with white males in some parts of the South. Southern white men have favored Clinton by 50 percent to 40 percent, voting heavily against Obama in South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. He's won an even split of their vote in Delaware, Georgia and Maryland and prevailed by a lopsided margin in Virginia.

Obama does best with better-educated people, and that's reflected among white men in the South. He's prevailed among white male college graduates in six Southern states and finished even in another.

But he's not caught on with Southern white men lacking college degrees: among them, he's lost nine states.

Clinton strong with union families

About three in 10 Democratic voters have come from households with at least one union member. Clinton has a 4-point advantage with this group.

They could help her in the March 4 showdown in Ohio, where 44 percent of voters in the state's 2004 Democratic primary were from union families.

The big Clinton advantage with union voters has been along racial lines. Whites from union households back her nationally by 17 points, a bit stronger than her 10-point lead among all whites. Black union members support Obama by the same 4-to-1 margin as all blacks, while six in 10 Hispanic union members are behind Clinton, just as they are overall.

Senior citizens like Clinton

A third of Obama's voters have been black, compared with fewer than one in 10 of Clinton's. Forty-five percent of hers were white women, as were 27 percent of his. One in five Clinton voters were age 65 or over, nearly double Obama's proportion.