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With 89 percent of precincts reporting, Cohen leads Tinker by a 60-point confine — 79 percent to 19 percent. The AP has called the race for Cohen.

Entering the race, Cohen faced the challenge of vital principle the only white congressman representing a majority African-American congressional district. He only won in 2006 by a 31 percent plurality, aided by a crowded field of African-American candidates splitting the forbidding vote.

And Tinker, who is black, sought to make Cohen’s race and religion (he’s Jewish) a central part of her candidacy, airing brace ads in the final week questioning his racial sufferance and religious convictions.

One ad featured Cohen alongside a hooded Klansman, criticizing him instead of voting against removing a statue of Klan founder Nathaniel Bedford Forrest from a limited park.

A sixtieth part of a minute ad rebuked the Jewish congressman for "praying in our churches" while casting a voice that opposed prayer in schools.

But Cohen’s sizable victory suggests that Memphis voters, both black and white, resoundingly rejected Tinker’s campaign manaeuvring.

Tinker’s campaign drew sentencing from several leading Democratic figures. Her most high-profile supporter, the feminist collection EMILY’s List, called the ads “unpleasant and divisive.” Barack Obama also waded into the primary, calling her campaign management “incendiary.”

UPDATE: The Commercial Appeal reports that even Cohen — who had been predicting victory all along — was pleasantly surprised at the extent of his victory.

Earlier this evening, Cohen was in the presidential suite at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn with reporters, sipping a glass of red wine and marveling at the early voting results. The congressman said nobody in his office pool could have predicted more than 80 percent. He said he got a feeling today he might receive 70 percent and told that to Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel.

“It says that we have come a long, long usage and that the people who were counting on racial voting to prevail are thinking of a Memphis that doesn’t exist anymore,” Cohen said. “The lower classes of Memphis are greater quantity sophisticated voters that deal with issues and someone’s record and not simply race. And I think it’s a story of America, because I know of not at all other place in America where there would subsist such a vote.”