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April 24, 2008

White Female Democrats Against Obama

Patrick Casey
Earlier this week at the Huffington Post, Nora Ephron attributed the problems that the Democrats are having to the usual suspect for the elites - racist, misogynistic white men. The headlines in the drive-by media for weeks have been about racial and gender tensions among Democrats.

As the Dems are supposed to be the enlightened elite, journalists must be quite annoyed that they had to release their pre-written scripts on the racist, woman-hating Republicans a few months early -- and were forced to replace the term Republicans with Democrats in all their copy. Ephron, for example, probably had to cross out any adjective referring to the GOP in her hideous rant.

But yesterday's analysis on the PA primary from NBC's Chuck Todd brought a new twist to the table - it wasn't white men who carried Hillary to victory, it was white women (First Thoughts: Secrets to Hillary's Success). And if she is to continue to do well heading up to the convention (essentially the only chance she has to convince superdelegates to pick her over Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee), Hillary Clinton is going to have to rely on white women to do it.

So how did Clinton win so decisively last night? The answer is women, specifically white women. They continue to be as important to her success in these primaries as new voters and African-Americans have been to Obama. Per the exit polls, 47% of the Pennsylvania Democratic electorate last night was made up of white women, higher than any other race/gender subgroup. Clinton ended up winning them by more than 30 points, 66%-34%; in Ohio, she won this group, 67%-31%. The question that everyone seems to be asking now is: Why can't Obama put Clinton away? The AP's Ron Fournier takes a stab at answering this, and he points to five reasons (race, working-class voters, friends in trouble, inexperience, and mettle). But to us, women seem to be the bigger reason. They continue to rally to her side; nothing has shaken their confidence in her. If Clinton continues to beat Obama by 30-plus points among white women, how can he knock her out?

So, is Nora Ephron now going to accuse white Democratic women as being racists because they're voting almost en masse for Hillary? Oh, that's right, she's a white Democratic woman...racist?

You live by identity politics, you die by identity politics.

Posted at 01:47 PM | Email | | Share Share
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