On Feb 12, 2008, at 11:26 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
> Obama beats Frau Clinton by 9-5. The Dumbocrats outvote the
> Repugnicons 2-1. In a very "red" very "conservative" Confederate
> state.
While you've got a point, Virginia isn't what it used to be. It's much more "diverse" and much less conservative than it was when I lived there in the late 1970s. And the most Dem part of the state is Northern Virginia, which is full of Obama types. As I recall, it has the lowest share of blacks of any former Confederate state.
This is Gary Langer's analysis of the Virginia vote.
<http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/Vote2008/Story?id=4280392&page=3>
VA DEM -- In the Democratic contest Obama not only won 90 percent of African-Americans but beat Hillary Clinton among whites, 52-47 percent. That came on the strength of his support from white men, who favored him by an 18-point margin.
Obama has won or tied Clinton among white men in 12 previous contests in which exit polls were conducted, and in seven of them he won the race. (Those he lost include California and Arizona, where Hispanics made the difference for Clinton.)
Blacks accounted for 30 percent of voters in Virginia, compared with their 33 percent share in 2004; their support for Obama was near his highest from African-Americans in any primary this year (93 percent in Illinois).
While Hispanics accounted for just 5 percent of voters, Obama narrowly won them, 54-46 percent, in Virginia; as noted, in only one previous state, Connecticut, has he won Hispanics. (In Maryland, Hispanics accounted for 4 percent of voters and broke 55-45 percent for Clinton.)
Obama also was helped by independents, who made up 22 percent of voters in Virginia's open primary. While Clinton won white Democrats by a 12-point margin (56 percent to 44 percent), white independents went even more broadly to Obama, 66-33 percent.
A third of all Democratic voters were from northern Virginia, the more moderate-to-liberal region of the commonwealth, and Obama claimed 62 percent of their votes. Only in the largely rural Shenandoah and southwest of the state did Clinton win, a region that accounted just one in nine Democratic voters.