Post-Pennsylvania, everyone is trying to decipher the meaning of Clinton’s not-really 10 percentage point victory there (or have just gotten tired of it all). Many have concluded it doesn’t mean anything since the outcome was largely expected.
Still others are calling it another Clinton comeback – even though its hard to buy that argument when earlier polls had her up by 20 points in the Keystone State. What exactly did she come back from – a bigger victory?
And of course a lot of the commentary has focused again on how Obama can’t close the deal with white folks, especially those who don’t make much cash. And that in turn is being spun out as a reason for why he would be in trouble in the general, because he can’t pull wins in the big rust-belt states. But here again the analysis is simplistic, casting Obama’s struggles in blunt racial or classist terms, overlooking some important facts.
And the biggest factor overlooked is gender. Obama suffers at the hands of not just all white voters, but specifically white female voters. Here from an article in the Seattle Times:
White women, according to exit polls, made up 46 percent of those voting Tuesday, and Clinton carried them 68 percent to 32 percent.
By contrast, she carried white men by 57 percent to 43 percent, and they made up 33 percent of those voting.
Moreover, exit polls found, 14 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate were women who said the candidates’ gender was important in deciding how to vote. Clinton won that group by 77 percent to 23 percent. Bositis (from the Center for Political and Economic Studies) said that means those voters accounted for 7.6 percentage points of her overall advantage over Obama, or 82 percent of her total victory margin of 9.3 points.
Yet, rather than being read as evidence of a Clinton strength, these results mostly have been interpreted as a worrying sign for Obama’s ultimate general-election chances.
Important point that and one too absent from the conventional post-Penna spin. And what it means for the general from my perspective is that Obama can bring home many of the white female voters he has been losing in key primaries. They may be Hillary partisans now, but white working class women have started to trend back toward the Democrats (a lot more than men have), particularly in the 2006 mid-terms, where they were only +5 Republican. If Obama had kept his margin among white women to similar levels, he would have won the State handily. He just has to keep his white working class male vote close enough as well and he will be competitive in the rust-belt, as well as in those western and southern states (Colorado and Virginia for instance) where he runs significantly ahead of Clinton in matchups with McCain.
What this speaks to is the fact that we should not read too much from the primary results in looking at prospective general election matchups. Most of that line is self-serving spin cloaked as analysis. And all those polls that have 20% of Clinton folks not voting for Obama and vice versa are taken in the heat-of-the-moment and likely won’t reflect voter preferences six-months forward. The general will be a whole different ballgame and a united party (swollen with new voters, new money and new energy) will be tough to beat come November.
laurel says
that she would pick up most current obama supporters in teh general. the party will unite behind whoever the nominee is, whether clinton or obama.
justin-credible says
Obama or Clinton, voters will follow similar trends to the ’06 elections.
Change is teh buzzword. The Dems represent it, the Reps don’t.
lanugo says
even if at times – we Obama supporters may proclaim it not to be.
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p>One caveat to that is that if this goes all the way to the convention and is ugly all the way it may be just that much harder to repatch the wounds. Positivity from both candidates can would be nice, lest we actually do real lasting damage.
laurel says
would be ideal. but we can’t control what they or their campaigns do. we can only control what we ourselves do. it isn’t enough for the official campaigns to be positive. candidate supporters must be positive towards the alternate candidate too, or the rallying cry of “positive change” is truly hollow. i’ve see too many supporters on both sides drive metaphorical spikes into the alternate candidate and their supporters. we all need to live up to the rhetoric we all pretend to endorse.
sco says
Most times it seems like they can’t control what their campaigns do, or at least not their campaign surrogates.
lanugo says
letting the campaign’s twists and turns get me down. That said, when I believe my candidate is getting a bad rap I do feel the need to defend him.
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p>This post itself in a sense is defensive in that I wanted to counter the spin of late (and yes a good deal of it is fed by the Clinton campaign, understandaly so given they are down in the delegate and vote count lines) that Obama can’t win in the general because he lost states like Penn in the primaries. A lot of press coverage has focused on the line – black man can’t win white working class votes – and I think that is overly simplistic and fails to recognize that Clinton has a core base of female support every bit as attracted to her own history making campaign as Obama has with African-Americans and the youth vote.
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p>I do want to be positive, but sometimes its hard not to get fired up. I do commend you for generally staying above the grime – good form and good example.