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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (61337)	4/24/2008 10:13:09 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 542946

A Tough Spin By Chris Suellentrop Dick Polman – the Philadelphia Inquirer national political columnist (whom Charlie Rose invited to do postgame analysis last night alongside Mark Halperin, Al Hunt, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Herbert and Jacob Weisberg) – breaks down the post-Pennsylvania math for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at his Inquirer blog. “Obama’s attempt last night to spin the defeat was empirically absurd,” Polman writes. He elaborates: Problem was, he lost all the older voter categories, starting at age 45. He lost white people, both genders. And with respect to every background, he lost the working-class folks, the union members, and the non-college educated. He lost suburbanites (including two of the suburban Philadelphia counties, Montgomery and Bucks, that he needed to win by comfortable margins), small-town dwellers, and rural residents. He lost the white Catholics and he lost the Jews. He lost the culturally-conservative Democrats on Bob Casey’s home turf, Lackawanna County, by a 3 to 1 margin. And let’s return to the racial factor for a moment, because there is a jarring and highly sensitive finding that showed up in the exit polls. Thirteen percent of white voters statewide said that the race of the candidate was important to them; of those voters, 74 percent cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. This is arguably a warning sign that Obama may face a higher racial hurdle than many observers have generally assumed. An arguably bigger problem is his persistent deficit among late-deciding voters. I mentioned here yesterday that, in most primaries, Obama has stumbled at the finish line because voters making up their minds during the final 24 hours have tended to break for Clinton, the known quantity. Well, in Pennsylvania it happened again. Eleven percent made up their minds on the last day; 6 out of 10 wound up breaking for Clinton, thereby padding her victory margin.