In the Mountaineer state, Hillary Clinton followed the brilliant strategy of winning everywhere.
Upcountry
Talking Points Memo
13 May 2008
If the exit polls (and the pre-election polls) are accurate, Hillary Clinton is set to win West Virginia by roughly a 2 to 1 margin over Barack Obama. Oregon, next Tuesday, favors Obama. But Kentucky, which votes the same day, seems likely to yield a similar margin for Sen. Clinton. So what is it about these two states that makes them so favorable to Hillary Clinton?
There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama's problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama's problem isn't with white working class voters or rural voters. It's Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he's getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.
If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.
In so many words, Pennsylvania and Ohio have big chunks of Appalachia within their borders. But those regions are heavily offset by non-Appalachian sections that are cultural and demographically distinct. West Virginia is 100% Appalachian. If you look at southeastern Ohio or the middle chunk of Pennsylvania, Obama did about the same as he's doing tonight in West Virginia.
Below is a map of the Appalachian counties stretching from New York down into Mississippi. Below that is a map of counties that Hillary Clinton has won by more than 65%. As you can see match up quite closely -- the grey gaps are Kentucky and West Virginia which hadn't voted yet.
So what is it about this region?
Let me offer a series of overlapping explanations. First, some basic demographics. It's widely accepted that Hillary Clinton does better with older voters, less educated voters and white voters. These demographics perfectly match West Virginia -- and, more loosely, the entire Appalachian region. A few key points from tonight's exit polls demonstrate the point: 4 out of 10 voters were over 60 years of age. 7 out of 10 lacked a college degree -- the highest proportion of any electorate in the country. And 95% of the electorate was white.
Basically you have a state that is made up almost exclusively of Clinton's voters. But there's a deeper historical explanation that we have to apply as well -- one nicely illustrated by the origins of West Virginia itself.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the middle Atlantic and particularly in the Southern states, there was a long-standing cleavage between the coastal and 'piedmont' regions on the one hand and the upcountry areas to the west on the other. It's really the coastal lowlands and the Appalachian districts. On the other side of the Appalachian mountain range the pattern is flipped, with the Appalachians in the east and the lowlands in the west.
These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that's where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.
As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.
This is history. But it shapes the region. It's overwhelmingly white, economically underdeveloped (another legacy of the pre-civil war pattern) and arguably because of that underdevelopment has very low education rates and disproportionately old populations.
For all these reasons, if you're familiar with the history, it's really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.
Eschewing Appalachia might be risky but by no means suicidal. Clinton said in her victory speech on Tuesday night that no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without taking West Virginia. True. But they all could have won without it. The margins of victory in those races ranged from 23 to 515 electoral votes. West Virginia has five.
So, when she stops casting the nomination as a standoff between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Huxtables and accepts the outcome as a fait accompli, the party can unite, and there will be a better sense as to which states are in play.
Obama has proclaimed "change" his mantra. That change may well be evident in the electoral map come fall. Appalachia is all American, but America is not all Appalachian.
Would Obama Contest Nebraska?
The Electoral Map
May 14, 2008
Nebraska is one of two state where Electoral College votes are allocated based on who wins congressional district s(the other is Maine). The candidate who wins each districts get a vote, and whoever wins the state as a whole gets two additional votes. So could Obama make a run at any of these congressional districts and pick off a vote or two?
A SurveyUSA poll released in February found that Obama would eclipse John McCain 44-42% in the 1st District (Lincoln) and the edge McCain 45-43% in the 2nd District (Omaha). Before I interpret these findings, it's important to note that SurveyUSA isn't the most well-respected polling outfit out there because of their robo-calling techniques.
But still, the results do indicate that Obama should at least give it a shot. Former popular Sen. Bob Kerrey (D) is a supporter and even Omaha's favorite billionaire Warren Buffett has praised Obama. On top of that, Obama will lilkey inundate the Omaha media market with ads as he tries to reach western Iowa voters right across the Mississippi River.
So why not make a run at NE-02? Omaha is the largest city on the Great Plains north of Kansas City and west of Minneapolis and has been "quietly booming, with new affluent neighborhoods," according to the handy Almanac of American Politics. And NE-01, for its part, is home to the University of Nebraska, which surely has more than a few Obama fans.
How Obama Beat the Line
RealClearPolitics HorseRaceBlog
By Jay Cost
May 07, 2008
Last night, Barack Obama beat expectations in both Indiana and North Carolina. Let's look carefully at how he managed this feat. We'll begin with Indiana. Let's compare the results from Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio among select demographic groups.
As you can see, Clinton did about as well in Indiana as she did in Pennsylvania and Ohio with white men, white Protestants, and seniors. However, beyond this, she suffered a decline among her best groups. Notice in particular her decline among white women, white Catholics, and union households. Basically, the core of her voting bloc was still with her, but Obama picked off a larger portion of it than he did in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Why did this happen? It wasn't because of southern Indiana. All of the counties south of metro Indianapolis went for Clinton except Monroe County, where Indiana University is located. Clinton won almost all of these counties in the south by at least 10 points. In some instances, her margins were 30 and even 40 points. All in all, the region bore a resemblance to southern Ohio, where Clinton did really well.
One big problem for Clinton came in metropolitan Indianapolis. Obama beat her in metro Indy by 17 points. Much of this came from Marion County, where a large number of African Americans live. However, discounting Marion County, she only won about 51.6% of the vote. Factor that in with her losses in Fort Wayne, South Bend (home to Notre Dame, and thus a reason why she underperformed among white Catholics), and Gary, and we approach an answer to why the final result was so close.
What about North Carolina? It is instructive, I think, to compare the results from North Carolina to those of Tennessee and Virginia. For the sake of perspective, let's add some basic demographic features of the three states - namely median white income as of 2000 and the percentage of African Americans in the state. We'd expect a priori that as both figures fall, Clinton would do better.
As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?
Unlike Indiana, it doesn't come from Clinton's core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn't do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.
Clinton's problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region - one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama - not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon - most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.
The following chart has the details. It delineates Obama's margin of victory among African Americans over time. The states are divided into the South and non-South, then arranged chronologically.
We have to be careful not to over-interpret these results because they are relatively small sub-samples of each exit poll. Nevertheless, there is a discernible trend in these numbers toward larger and larger Obama victories. The African American vote now goes much more heavily for Obama than it did at the beginning of the cycle. In fact, if we take Clinton's margin among African Americans in Tennessee and apply it to North Carolina, keeping all else equal, Obama would have barely defeated her.
So, we can conclude that Clinton's narrow victory in Indiana was largely because she didn't do as well with her strong groups as in Ohio and Pennsylvania. However, she did do just as well in the south. It was in metro Indy and in the north that she didn't do as well. On the other hand, Obama's extremely large victory in North Carolina was due to his strength among African Americans, a group with which he has improved over time.
The Democratic race over time
by Meng Bomin
Sun May 11, 2008 at 06:22:01 PM PDT
As promised, here are the maps from the Democratic primary. Like the commentary I did for the Republican race, this may be a little long and I apologize in advance for that. If you don't want to read everything, you can scroll through the maps and read the text near the ones you find interesting.
All the color maps here will follow this scale (with some caveats):
In the featured maps, red represents Clinton votes, green represents Edwards votes, and blue represents Obama votes. The caveat is that many counties are actually slightly darker than anything on this scale because of other votes (Biden, Richardson, Uncommitted, etc.).
To start, here's the map of the primaries so far, updated to include Indiana and North Carolina:
Now, there are several common criticisms of this map. The first is that it treats th Florida and Michigan primaries as if they were normal legitimate contests and that the map I use not only doesn't reflect that, but gives the false impression that Michigan was unanimously for Clinton, since every county is a shade of red, since the other two candidates were not on the ballot (Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, Gravel, and Uncommitted were the only ones that were).
This is a fair criticism, but there is no perfect way to represent the situation. I chose the above representation since it reflects the data, and I find that the strange coloration of Michigan with respect to the surrounding states actually accentuates the strangeness of the contest. However, for those who think otherwise, I've made two modified versions.
The first just addresses Michigan's coloration. I've treated Michigan's Uncommitted votes as if they were votes for Obama:
<snip>
A second criticism, and one that I have not yet addressed in the form of an adjusted map, is that it treats all counties as equals in terms of voter density, which is nowhere near reality. Earlier, I did make a map weighted by Kerry voter density, which is represented by this map (brightness is determined on a logarithmic scale):
<see original post for map>
As you can see, not all counties are created equal, and so, the maps here have a fatal flaw in misrepresenting the actual vote ratio. Missouri is a good demonstration of this, where the vast majority of counties and as a result, the vast majority of the land area leans significantly toward Clinton, but Obama narrowly won the state, because of his superior performance in the urban areas.
So, in many areas, Obama's performance looks weaker in my maps than it is, though many of the western states where Obama had strong performance actually have very few people (and even fewer Democrats), so in some ways, it biases toward Clinton, while in others, it biases toward Obama. [..]
Now, as well as colored maps, I have some one-candidate maps that show that candidate's vote ratio by county:
Obama
Clinton
Edwards
<snip>
Now, I do want to make a few points from these maps, where the contrast is most clear. The first is that Clinton actually did quite well in North Carolina. If you compare North Carolina to the surrounding states in the Obama map, you will see that Obama drew a comparatively lower proportion of the vote (I suggest the Obama map because of the confounding factor of the Edwards vote in South Carolina, which took away mainly from what became Clinton's voting base in subsequent contests). However, part of this may be not that Clinton did well in North Carolina, but that Obama did well in Virginia, which I'll get to later.
On the other hand, Indiana looks just like western Ohio, which suggests that her performance there was actually weaker than in North Carolina in the sense that she only did as well as she did in similar contests earlier and not better, as she did in North Carolina. Of course, one could point out that there is a dramatic shift at the Indiana-Illinois border, but it's not much different than the shift at the Missouri-Illinois border, two contests that were held on the same day. [..]
