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LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Whites and minorities in Nevada who said race was a factor in their presidential vote split in opposite directions on Election Day, revealing clear divisions in the vote, an Associated Press exit poll showed.

About one in four of all McCain backers in Nevada -- including one in four whites -- said race was a factor in their vote, the poll showed. One in four Obama voters said the same thing about their vote, and one in five white Obama voters said race was a factor.

Among whites, those who said race mattered tilted the overall white vote toward Republican John McCain. The three quarters of whites who said race was not a factor voted about evenly for McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, the poll showed.

At the same time, nearly all black voters picked Obama whether they said race mattered or not. Hispanic voters picked Obama 3-to-1 over McCain regardless of whether they said race was a factor, but Hispanics more often than whites said race mattered in their vote.

"With the first black running to be president, I wanted to speak my mind," said Devin Dupree, a 20-year-old Truckee Meadows Community College student.

Dupree, a first-time voter, said he backed Obama despite being a registered Republican.

"I agree with his personal beliefs, and it's about time we have a colored person as president," Dupree said. "The time has come."

Kenneth Fernandez, an assistant professor who teaches ethnic and minority politics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the Tuesday results showed that Republicans will have to do more to consider the growing number of minority voters in Nevada.

He said that while certain policies -- fiscal conservatism and national security, for example -- can be attractive to anyone regardless of race, Republicans were punished by perceptions that they are anti-immigration and against affirmative action.

"It tells the Republican Party that you have a new demographic of voters that are going to be repulsed by certain social policies that Republicans back," Fernandez said Wednesday. "These things are going to antagonize groups of people, and in a two-party system, there's only one other choice."

Roughly three in 10 voters identified with a race other than white, and one in four said they were black or Hispanic, the poll said. In 2004, whites made up three quarters of the Nevada vote.

Fernandez said the role of race in the Tuesday election was different from any that preceded it.

"Traditionally when race mattered, it severely hurt minority candidates," Fernandez said. "Race does matter, but now it matters in different ways."

The survey of 2,769 Nevada voters was conducted for AP by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. Most were interviewed in a random sample of 40 precincts statewide Tuesday; 728 who voted early or absentee were interviewed by landline telephone over the last week. Results for the full sample were subject to sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, higher for subgroups.