Oregon vs Kentucky
Voters in Oregon unconcerned with race and satisfied with either Democratic candidate; Kentucky voters for Hillary preoccupied with race, unhappy with Obama
Check out these huge contrasts between Kentucky and Oregon!
First, the "bitterness quotient". Well, that's what I dubbed it, anyhow. More about how I defined and calculated it
here,
here,
here and
here.
What this table shows, calculated on the basis of the exit poll data, is what percentage of Obama voters would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the nominee, and what percentage of Clinton voters would be dissatisfied with Obama as nominee.
A few patterns have stood out:
1) The number of those who would be dissatisfied with the other candidate as nominee (the "bitterness quotient") has gradually risen over time
2) Hillary supporters have pretty consistently proven to be more dissatisfied with the idea of Obama as nominee than vice versa
3) The percentage of Hillary voters who would be dissatisfied with Obama as nominee shot up to a level all of its own in a number of Southern states.
Now how do the latest states figure in?
Resentment among Obama voters reached its apex earlier this month. In the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, and subsequently among the relatively rare Obama voters in West-Virginia, a clear majority of over 55% of Obama voters expressed dissatisfaction with the prospect of Hillary as nominee.
This time round, however, in Kentucky and especially Oregon, that sentiment seems to have faded again. A sign of confidence among Obama supporters, who feel more magnanimous now they're sure it's a hypothetical question anyway?
Hillary voters are a different question altogether. Among them the 55% barrier had been broken already in most of the March 4 primaries. In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the percentage of Hillary supporters with some distaste at the prospect of an Obama nomination rose to the lower 60s - a level that had not before been broached outside Southern states.
In West-Virginia the number ratcheted up to 74% - three out of four Hillary voters unhappy with the idea of Obama as nominee. That was a record even taking Southern states into account.
And this round? An unprecedented contrast between the two states at hand. In Kentucky, again a new record. There, almost 4 out of 5 Hillary supporters was dissatisfied thinking of Obama as nominee. But in Oregon, serenity. More than half of Hillary voters there said they'd be satisfied with Obama too; a rate of dissatisfaction as low as it has only been in Utah, Wisconsin and Vermont since Super Tuesday.
Striking, eh?
Moving on to a possibly related metric: the influence of race on the choice of the voters.
For a long time now, exit polls have been asking voters whether race played a role in their decision whom to vote for. In the last few states, the results to that question are broken down by race too. After the primaries in West-Virginia,
I posted a table here based on those numbers, recalculated so you can see directly what percentage of all white voters said race was a consideration for them.
Here's an update showing the results in Kentucky and Oregon - and the contrast again is striking:
Kentucky equalled West-Virginia when it came to considering race. A little over one in five white voters said race was a factor in deciding their vote. And those people were even more massively likely to be Hillary voters than in West-Virginia: 88% of them voted for Clinton.
Considering that even in an anonymous survey, the social desirability of answers can heavily impact results, and considering that confessing that you voted against the black candidate because of race is about as political incorrect as you can get in an exit poll, I would guess that the real number here is much higher still. If one in five
admit they voted for Hillary partly because of race, I tend to just sort of double that figure in my head for a wild guess at the real extent of the phenomenon.
Oregon offers a striking contrast. Here, just 8% of white voters said that race was a factor in their choice. That's much lower than in any of the other five states that voted recently, which are all in the Lower Midwest or South. And of course, it's barely over a third of the number in Kentucky.
Moreover, the exit poll doesnt break down how the whites in Oregon who did vote at least partly on the basis of race split between Hillary and Obama, because the sample is too small. But you can roughly calculate what the split must have been on the basis of the data that
is available (namely, how the white vote overall split, and how whites for whom race was
not a factor voted). And it looks like those whites in Oregon who did base their vote partly on race actually split evenly between the two candidates. I.e., as many who wanted to give the black candidate an extra boost as who were reluctant to vote for a black candidate. Again, that's a sharp contrast with the five Midwestern/Southern states that recently voted, where whites who voted partly on race were massively Hillary voters.
A cultural difference? Obama has certainly been polling very well in the West -- and quite badly in the South and Lower Midwest. All in all more grist for the mill for those who would guess that racial prejudice and resentment plays a large role in how he performs. Larger than most people or media will admit.
