I am beginning to suspect that one could predict Obama's support in any state by adding the number of Black voters to the number of white voters who ever owned, or even thought of owning, a lava lamp. Hence Oregon (pronounced Or-ah-gen). With about half the precincts counted, Obama is leading Clinton by a cool 16 points.
But Ms. C got lucky in Kentucky. With 100% of the vote recorded, she once again flattened Obama 65/30%. To put that in perspective, election watchers usually call a margin of 10% or better a landslide. Margins of 20% or better suggest an election that was never really competitive. When one of the candidates is a well-liked incumbent, or the other got caught in a prostitution scandal, that's when you expect such lopsided margins. A victory of 35% usually requires both.
Obama carried Louisville and Lexington-Fayette counties. That's two small bruises on an otherwise solidly Clinton map. By contrast, the exit polls tell us almost nothing, because Ms. Clinton took pretty much every defined group by 60% or more.
Obama has a problem. There a large stretches of territory in these United States where he couldn't be elected sanitation engineer. There is a meme developing to explain this, if not explain it away: call it the Hillbilly meme. You can find a discussion of it at Salon.
In analyzing the returns from last week's West Virginia Democratic primary, a phalanx of reporters and commentators have explained Hillary Clinton's landslide victory by pointing out that West Virginians are a special set of Democrats, white, low income and undereducated. Some, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse papers, have linked the lackluster performance of Barack Obama in West Virginia to a larger Appalachian problem. ...
The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry's wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton's Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these "special" Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans...
However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live. And that could mean trouble for the fall...
When you look at the earlier aggregate rural vote on Super Tuesday, the preference for Clinton is clearly not confined to Appalachia. Combining the results from 22 diverse states in the Northeast, South, Midwest and West on Feb. 5, Clinton beat Obama 55 percent to 38 percent among rural voters, according to an analysis in DailyYonder.com, the news Web site of the organization I head, the Center for Rural Strategies. Those aren't West Virginia margins, but they aren't close. They shine a light on a vulnerability that Democrats have shared through the last several election cycles.
The reality is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose. That was Bill Clinton's reality in winning as it was the reality for Al Gore and John Kerry in narrowly losing.
This is the problem that the Democrats face. Their party is divided between hip waders and lava lamps. When some who appeals to the hip waders gets nominated, the lava lamps fall into line. But it doesn't necessarily work in reverse. We might be about to watch the Party of Jefferson once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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