Obama won NC as expected with a pretty much 100% backing from blacks while Hillary is winning big with white blue collar workers:
Nearly unanimous support among African-Americans lifted Barack Obama to easy victory in North Carolina, while the Democratic presidential primary in Indiana played out against a more complex matrix of voter groups.
Blacks accounted for a third of North Carolina voters and 91 percent of them supported Obama in preliminary exit poll results. Against that voting bloc Hillary Clinton would have needed 70 percent of non-black voters; she fell well short, with 58 percent.
Turnout by African-Americans was in line with past years – 31 percent in 1992, the last North Carolina primary in which an exit poll was conducted. Obama has won all eight of the primaries this year in which blacks accounted for at least three in 10 Democratic voters.
Another result, mirroring one in Pennsylvania two weeks ago, indicated a potentially negative impact of racially motivated voting. Fourteen percent of white voters in North Carolina called race an important factor in their vote; these Democratic primary voters were much less apt than others to say they’d support Obama against John McCain in November. It’s a small group, but small groups can matter in close contests.
Among those voters, just 48 percent said they’d support Obama against McCain; the rest said they’d take McCain or sit it out. By contrast, among the large majority of whites who said race was not an important factor, 61 percent said they’d support Obama in the general election. It’s an open question whether those white voters – overwhelmingly Clinton supporters now – would in fact come around to Obama were he the nominee.
About those blue collar workers:
Sen. Hillary Clinton, who made a strong pitch to blue-collar workers, was pulling a majority of the votes in rural and suburban Indiana during Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
In early exit polling, Clinton of New York was taking 53 percent of the vote in suburban areas, compared to 47 percent for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, and 68 percent of the rural vote compared to Obama’s 32 percent.
And with 14% of the vote in from Indiana Hillary has extended her lead by 39,000 votes. But she may well have lost by double digits in NC which is bad. If she had kept it in single digits and did well in Indiana it would be hard to say that she is done.
Still plenty of votes to count so we shall see.
UPDATE
Obama gave his victory speech in NC and began it with his usual divisive talk about the rich and the poor…..and then accuses the right of being divisive THEN to top it all off he stated that Roosevelt talked to Hitler and Tojo.
Poor guy is going to get trounced in the general.
The woman I met in Indiana who just lost her job, and her pension, and her insurance when the plant where she worked at her entire life closed down – she can’t afford four more years of tax breaks for corporations like the one that shipped her job overseas. She needs us to give tax breaks to companies that create good jobs here in America. She can’t afford four more years of tax breaks for CEOs like the one who walked away from her company with a multi-million dollar bonus. She needs middle-class tax relief that will help her pay the skyrocketing price of groceries, and gas, and college tuition. That’s why I’m running for President.
The college student I met in Iowa who works the night shift after a full day of class and still can’t pay the medical bills for a sister who’s ill – she can’t afford four more years of a health care plan that only takes care of the healthy and the wealthy; that allows insurance companies to discriminate and deny coverage to those Americans who need it most. She needs us to stand up to those insurance companies and pass a plan that lowers every family’s premiums and gives every uninsured American the same kind of coverage that Members of Congress give themselves. That’s why I’m running for President.
The mother in Wisconsin who gave me a bracelet inscribed with the name of the son she lost in Iraq; the families who pray for their loved ones to come home; the heroes on their third and fourth and fifth tour of duty – they can’t afford four more years of a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. They can’t afford four more years of our veterans returning to broken-down barracks and substandard care. They need us to end a war that isn’t making us safer. They need us to treat them with the care and respect they deserve. That’s why I’m running for President.
The man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one – he can’t afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies; a policy that’s not only keeping gas at record prices, but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet in the process. He doesn’t need four more years of Washington policies that sound good, but don’t solve the problem. He needs us to take a permanent holiday from our oil addiction by making the automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future. That’s the change we need. And that’s why I’m running for President.
~~~Yes, we know what’s coming. We’ve seen it already. The same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas. The same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy in the hope that the media will play along. The attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain – to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white and black, and brown.
This is what they will do.
~~~The other side can label and name-call all they want, but I trust the American people to recognize that it’s not surrender to end the war in Iraq so that we can rebuild our military and go after al Qaeda’s leaders. I trust the American people to understand that it’s not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but our enemies – like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.
How else to interpret this then he wants to talk to al-Qaeda?
UPDATE
Ed Morrissey on this whole talking to the enemy baloney:
I’m particularly bemused by the references to FDR and Truman. Both men ended up having to conduct massive wars that outlasted their presidencies, and in FDR’s case in no small measure because Western nations insisted on talk rather than action. While we maintained diplomatic contact with Germany and Japan until Pearl Harbor, FDR did not meet with Hitler and Tojo. And that diplomatic contact didn’t stop war from coming; indeed, it make it much worse than it otherwise would have been, at least in Europe, had the US, UK, and France had taken the appropriate steps to disarm Hitler when he started his Versailles Treaty violations.
Truman met with Joseph Stalin during and after World War II, but that didn’t stop the Soviets from blockading West Berlin or ringing down an iron curtain across eastern Europe, enslaving those nations for almost 50 years. If Potsdam and Yalta are Obama’s idea of successful foreign policy, then he obviously hasn’t studied 20th century history. Talking with implacable tyrants leads to appeasement, which leads to either war or more implacability of the tyranny in question.
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