Johnson led with 20% of the vote, Holt was second with 23%, ...

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atabitaraf

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May 19, 2010
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Here is a text from My life by ex-president Bill Clinton:

Johnson led with 20% of the vote, Holt was second with 23%, Haze was third with 15%, Alfred got 13%, and the other 3 split the rest.

I think that there should be semi colon instead of comma. Why is it comma here?
 
They simply separate the individual items in a list. The commas are correct. Semi-colons would be wrong.
 
They simply separate the individual items in a list. The commas are correct. Semi-colons would be wrong.
But also separating clauses
 
But However, they are also separating clauses.
I'm going to leave it to an expert in grammar to explain this in more detail than I did in post #2. In the meantime, note my corrections above. As a learner, don't try to start sentences with "but".
 
There's no need for semicolons here. Commas do the job just fine.

If one or more of the separated clauses included commas themselves, then semicolons could be a better choice, but that's not the case here.
 
Either the numbers are wrong or Johnson and Holt should be the other way round.
 
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