Ignore all the talk of "white working class" voters. They are like the soccer Moms of yesteryear. Truth be known, George W. Bush's ace in the hole in 2004 were rural voters which made the difference in his re-election (Ohio, notwithstanding). Well, we have the Secret Rural Voters of 2008: the African American vote.
Salon has the details:Though a majority of black voters may inevitably have gone for Obama, nothing precluded the wife of the so-called first black president from keeping Obama's margins among blacks significantly narrower -- say, losing to him by 4-to-1 or even 3-to-1, rather than the devastating 9-to-1 margins by which Obama has often won African-American Democrats. "The Clinton campaign has been focused on Barack Obama's performance with white working-class voters in a few states, but they fail to mention Senator Clinton's abysmal performance with black voters all over the country," says political consultant and Obama supporter Jamal Simmons. "She has gone from leading among black voters to losing them 90 percent to 10 percent in Pennsylvania. One would expect Obama to win these voters, but 90-10 is a total collapse that Obama is not experiencing among any constituency. Simply put, Hillary Clinton has a black problem."
The article goes on to show how in a handful of states -- New York, Arkansas, Tennessee -- Hillary did very well, and received a great popular vote and net delegate count. How did she do that? She was able to cross the threshold of 20% of the African American vote. Yet in so many states, with Pennsylvania being the latest, she lost the black vote 9 to 1. It didn't have to go down that way. There were three reasons Obama routed Hillary for this demographic, one of which was her own fault:
In quick succession, three things happened in the month and a half between Thanksgiving and the New Hampshire primary. First, Oprah's unprecedented mid-December endorsement of Obama sent a clear signal to her mixed-race female-dominated audience that they should feel as comfortable having Obama on their living room television screens for the nightly newscast as they do having her there during late-afternoon coffee talk. Next, in January, white Iowans sent a safe-harbor signal to black Americans wary about the Democratic Party nominating a black candidate that it was OK to get behind Obama. Hillary Clinton had no control over either of those developments, of course. And a top Obama advisor confirmed to me that the campaign was already tracking movement by black voters toward Obama by Thanksgiving.
But Clinton did have (or should have had) control over the third factor: the behavior of her campaign and of Bill Clinton from that point forward. Yet, through a series of intended or unintended developments -- from Bill's "fairy tale" and "false premise" comments concerning Obama's stance on the Iraq war, to hints of black-brown animosities between African-American and Hispanic Democrats, to Hillary's incessant "not qualified to lead" insinuations about Obama -- the Clinton campaign signaled that if they were going to lose the black vote, they might as well turn it into an advantage with other elements in the Democratic coalition, notably white working-class voters.
Consequently, in a short span Hillary transformed from a celebrity into an object of scorn among numerous black Democrats.
There has been a lot of outrage about the Clinton campaign about their actions, but nobody has stated the obvious: not only was this new direction of the Clinton campaign completely devoid of decency or honor: it was a very, very bad strategy that has hastened her delegate deficit.
What might the situation look like now if Clinton had managed to keep Obama's 90 percent black support just to 80 percent? It's impossible to know for certain, because it depends on where specifically -- in which states and districts -- she garnered those extra black votes. But NBC News political director and delegate math expert Chuck Todd ventured a conservative, back-of-the-napkin estimate. "I'm not sure how many more delegates she would have gotten at 20 percent performance, but I'd guess roughly 25 to 30," Todd told me. "That may not seem like a lot, but it would have swung the net delegate margin by 50 to 60, or about a third of his current pledged delegate lead."
To supplement Todd's delegate estimates, I looked at something much easier to compute: the extra popular votes Clinton would have amassed in 13 primary states with significant black populations -- Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin -- had she won just 20 percent of the black voters in those states.
...
And the difference it would have made is striking: In those 13 other states, had she drawn just 20 percent of the African-American vote, Clinton would have shifted more than 270,000 votes from Obama to herself, a net swing of more than half a million votes. Which, by the way, is roughly the amount by which she trails Obama in the overall national popular vote right now.
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All of which brings me to a final point about the concentrated power of the black vote in the 2008 Democratic primary: The black vote was to Obama what small-state white voters in the Electoral College were to George W. Bush in 2000 -- namely, a concentrated bloc of voters whose power magnified their preferred candidate's electoral support beyond their absolute numerical value. For African-Americans, this should come as a pleasant irony, given the controversies about the counting of their votes in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio four years later.
Remarkable, isn't it? The article ends saying Hillary is still trying to get the black vote in upcoming states putting out an ad featuring Maya Angelou. The problem is, the damage has been done, and few in the black community are going to be convinced by Angelou. A better politician and campaign could have done the proper balancing act of getting those white working class voters without bleeding
so completely the African American vote. Hillary Clinton was not that politician and her uphill battle to the nomination is the consequence for her lack of vision or good politics.
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