Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - Posts
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After Super Tuesday, Slate's William Saletan pointed out
that Obama had made serious inroads with white voters, passing the 40
percent mark in eight Super Tuesday states. From last week's elections,
add Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Obama tied
Clinton with white voters in Connecticut and beat her among them in
Virginia, California, Illinois, and Utah. Obama did this even though,
until tonight, he has lost to Hillary among white women in every state
except Illinois and Iowa. If you crunch the exit poll data for race and gender in 20 states, you come up with the following two-part rule:
1) When Hillary wins white women by 20 points or fewer, she loses white men.
States this has been true for: Maryland, Georgia, Connecticut,
Virginia, New Mexico, and California. Plus tonight in Wisconsin, where
more than nine in 10 voters are white, Hillary won women by a slim
margin and Obama walked away with men. (Exception to the first part of
the rule, sort of: South Carolina, where she lost white men by one
point with John Edwards still on the ballot.) 2) When Hillary wins white women by more than 20 points, she wins white men.
States true for: New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, Missouri,
Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, along with an even
split of white men in Delaware. Exception to the second part of the
rule: Massachusetts, where Hillary won white women by 31 points,
according to the exit polls, and lost white men by one point.
The 20-point fulcrum suggests that to win white men in a state,
Hillary has to do really really well there. Which since Super Tuesday
of course hasn't happened, and is getting harder and harder to imagine.
Without white men, she has only won over all a couple of times, most
notably in California. Hillary still has the solid support of Latinos:
They broke for her
strongly—especially women, but men too—in the four states I checked,
which have sizeable Hispanic populations: Arizona, California, New
Mexico, and New Jersey. But even in Texas, how can that be enough?
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