EW YORK - Her name was not on any ballot, but one big winner in Tuesday's primary may have been Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The upcoming US Senate race, which pits the First Lady against New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was not a direct issue here, since both candidates are running unopposed within their parties.
But the results of the presidential contests, combined with a between-the-lines reading of exit polls, suggests a boost for Clinton.
The best news, from her vantage point, was that Vice President Al Gore won by such a huge margin, beating Bill Bradley 65 percent to 34 percent in the popular vote.
Before this week, it was much-debated whether Gore's strengths would pull Clinton or whether Clinton would have to pull Gore. The issue is now clearly settled: the coattails belong to Gore.
Another bit of good news for Clinton is that Gore won bigger still, by a 2-to-1 ratio, among a group that has been strikingly cool toward her - white women.
In the latest polls on the Senate race, Clinton and Giuliani are virtually tied, but Giuliani leads among white women by an astounding 51 percent to 37 percent. If Gore can bring some of them over to vote a straight-Democratic ticket, that might be enough to put the First Lady over the top.
Clinton might also be encouraged by data on the Republican primary. According to exit polls by the Voter News Service and the Associated Press, one-third of Republicans who voted for Senator John McCain do not like Giuliani.
Since McCain attracted 43 percent of the Republican voters - not much less than Bush's 51 percent - that is a fairly substantial chunk of potential defectors.
Then again, party cross-overs work the other way, too. One-third of Bradley voters do not care for Clinton. It is also worth noting that 22 percent of Democratic voters have a favorable opinion of Giuliani, while just 15 percent of Republican voters have a favorable view of the First Lady.
To the extent the primary provides much good news for Giuliani, one bit may be how well McCain did in the mayor's biggest stronghold of support - the suburbs of Long Island.
McCain the insurgent beat Bush the party favorite in both of Long Island's counties, Suffolk and Nassau - a stunning rebuke to the once-indisputable sway that the state party's machine held there.
In the final days before the primary, Giuliani refused to sign a statement - prepared by Republican Governor George W. Pataki and endorsed by nearly every other party bigwig - attacking McCain on his voting record. The mayor explained that, while he still endorsed Bush, he was not going to betray his friendship with McCain. It is a position that many McCain supporters - apart from the one-third who don't like Giuliani to begin with - might appreciate and remember in November.
The only other districts where McCain won decisively on Tuesday were Manhattan and Albany. These are Democratic strongholds, where Clinton leads in the polls. But Giuliani enjoys more support there than most Republicans do, and his independent stance on McCain might hold Clinton's margin at least somewhat in check.
More broadly, Giuliani may suffer from the generally weak and divided position in which the state Republican party finds itself, post primary. Bush - the candidate backed by the entire party structure, from Pataki on down - won 72 percent of the delegates (beating McCain, 67-26) and a majority (though just barely) of the popular vote. This might be considered a strong victory in some states, but not in New York, where the Republican machine has controlled primaries so tightly in the past that insurgents usually don't get on the ballot at all or, when they do, don't win any delegates.
''By New York standards, this was no blow-out,'' said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant. ''Bush should have won a much bigger majority.''
Some Republican politicians privately agree.
In short, the New York primary had two critical outcomes - Gore's emergence as a very strong Democratic candidate who is especially strong among women, and the appearance of cracks in the state's Republican party apparatus. ''Put them together,'' Sheinkopf said, ''and the net gain goes to Hillary Clinton.''
