nimh wrote:Obama suffers from race; Clinton benefits from gender
At least, that's what the preliminary Pennsylvanian exit polls suggest.
The NYT has some more detailed, troubling crosstabs about this in this story by Adam Nagourney:
The Bruising Will Go on for the Party, Too
Quote:The results of the exit poll, conducted at 40 precincts across Pennsylvania by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press, also found stark evidence that Mr. Obama's race could be a problem in the general election.
Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and 16 percent said they would not vote at all.
That's about 5-10% of the Democratic base Obama would lose over race.
The story also has quite possibly overlapping categories in which Obama will take hits against McCain in the fall:
Quote:Exit polls again highlighted the racial, economic, sex and values divisions within the party. To take one example, only 60 percent of Democratic Catholic voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama in a general election; 21 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain, exit polls show. [..]
Mrs. Clinton defeated him among [gun owners and church-goers]. About 20 percent of voters in those groups said they would choose Mr. McCain over Mr. Obama in a general election.
Two thoughts about this:
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IMO, anyone who maintained that race would not play all too prominent a role in this election anymore, or even that the race issue was no more pernicious than the gender factor, should think again.
For sure, gender bias and stereotyping is far more blatant than race baiting when it comes to how the
media cover Hillary and Obama. TV talking heads can talk about Hillary as a woman in ways that they would never get away with saying about Obama as black man.
But when it comes down to the choice voters make in the voting booth, the issue of race is more pernicious than the one of gender. The PA exit polls shows that men for whom the gender of the candidate was an important consideration actually broke
to Hillary, while whites for whom race was an issue overwhelmingly broke against Obama. But I also think race is more of a disadvantage than gender if only because at least the anti-woman vote of male voters is easily trumped by the pro-woman vote of female voters who vote for Hillary partly out of a sense of solidarity. There just arent enough African-Americans to get the same kind of equivalence on race.
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In short, in order to win, Obama will have to forge that new coalition that everyone has been talking about, appealing to swathes of independents, suburban voters, higher educated voters, and the kind culturally liberal, fiscally conservative voters whom the Republicans have been losing in droves. Because there are significant chunks of the old Democratic coalition that he will lose because of race.
But that, of course, might mean polishing his message back away from the dose of populism he injected into his campaign again, which in turn will make him sensitive to hemorraging more support among blue collar, ethnic/Catholic, small town voters.
Hillary's map in comparison looks more straightforward, if also more soul-deadening. She wont appeal to many who didnt also vote for the Dems in the struggles of 2000 and 2004 between entrenched camps. But on the other hand she would lose fewer of those who did. It would be an old-fashioned campaign of mobilising the base and digging in. Obama definitely offers more upward promise, but as the above quotes show also considerably more downward risk.
