The Mason-Dixon poll has Clinton at 48% to Obama's 43% with undecided at 8%. Don't know if the missing point is some fraction they split or 'Other'...?
TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo |
I'm guessing the current undecideds will break toward Clinton by about 3 to 1 putting the numbers at Clinton 54% to Obama 45% because of the old and white nature of the PA electorate.
One wild card in the equation is that students are hard to reach with land line polls because of their tendency to use cells only and I think an unpolled population of students will split by about 3 to 1 toward Obama.
Second puzzle. Black voters are supposed to be about 83% Obama. Really? I think they'll break a bit more toward him.
Possible result then is 53% Clinton and 47% Obama.
But that's guesswork math and me trying to be dispassionate. What does my gut say?
Clinton wins by at least 9% because whitey just keeps on being whitey.
So how did it turn out? As we all now know, Clinton by 10ish%.
How did the 'undecideds' break? Apparently 3 to 1 for Clinton. No surprise there. Probably the 'Bradley Effect'.
Here are some of the exit poll numbers.
Barack Obama failed to capture key demographics in Pennsylvania | World news | guardian.co.uk
Those numbers don't give us real insight into why those white voters voted that way, but a number I heard last night on MSNBC does.
Last night 16% of white voters said that "race" was important to their choice (outside of Philadelphia it was 20% who said this). 75% of that 16% said they voted for Clinton and 25% said they voted for Obama.
Unless I'm too tired to get the math correct, this means that 8% of the votes cast for Clinton were cast by white voters who had a significant...what to say...'concern' about Obama's race.
Margin of victory for Clinton 10%. Without the self-declared number of people who saw race as "important" the margin of victory would almost certainly have been smaller. Let's say one-half of those voters would have chosen Clinton even if race were not a factor for them. In that case she wins by about 6%, or something near what the polls suggested.
Not surprisingly, this means to me that Clinton winning a narrow victory of 5or 6% instead of a big victory at 10% is about the poisonous effect of white racism as a motive for voting. The Clinton campaign (and others) made race a central issue in the last few weeks and it worked to give her a big enough victory to stay in the race.
Whitey just kept on being whitey.