Barack Obama won the REAL DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY in Mississippi yesterday with 69 % of the vote, including 90% of the black vote and 42.8% of the white vote. Not the numbers you read in the funny papers yesterday morning? Please let me explain:
There was a huge hole in Wednesday’s coverage of the Mississippi Primary. My hometown newspaper’s coverage on page 4A (The State -a McClatchy rag) is typical:
"African-American Vote Carries Obama to Win"
The article (from the AP wire) goes on to say that Obama got 90% of the Black vote and ONLY 25% of the White vote. Of course, this line is reiterated throughout the news cycle with all the talking heads saying how bad this is for Obama, that he’s getting ONLY 25% of the White vote.
Then almost all of the television commentary across the board picked right up on the "racially polarized" theme, speculating that the Obama campaign seems to in a downward spiral with White voters and they reckon that this will be a huge problem in Pennsylvania if the vote is split like this and Joe Scarborough wonders why Obama is losing ground so significantly among whites and did so much better in Georgia than he did in Mississippi and blah, blah and more blah. All of this, of course, plays right into the hands of the Clinton campaign, because they need to cast Obama as the BLACK candidate. (So Hillary becomes, by inverse implication, the WHITE candidate.)
According to Jedreport's excellent analysis, 24% of Clinton voters were Republicans who showed up as part of Rush Limbaugh’s diabolical anti-democratic scheme to weaken the eventual Democratic nominee and to fan the flames of discontent and hatred between the Clinton and Obama camps. Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough can hardly control their glee at the brilliance of Limbaugh’s strategy, but they are not acknowledging it at all. Rush continues to boast about it and his listeners who went to the polls yesterday (estimated to be about 42,000) to vote for Hillary, quite openly admitted what they were doing in exit polling interviews. (There is a good possibility that the number of saboteurs could actually be quite a bit higher because it is likely that substantial number of these asshats lied about their party affiliation to the exit pollsters. In the coming days, somebody should take a look, precinct by precinct to get a better picture of who actually showed up to vote in Mississippi.)
In any case, let’s just take a look at the 24% number since that is all we have to work with. There were about 408,000 votes cast. Just for the sake of this exercise, let’s take those 42,000 white Republican Clinton voters out of the equation to see what the numbers actually were among Democrats. That would leave about 366,000 REAL Democrats who turned out to vote in the primary—roughly 204,000 Black voters and 162,000 White voters. The results among those Democrats break down something like this:
Obama 253,000 (69%) Clinton 113,000 (31%)
The 204,000 BLACK VOTES cast:
Obama 183,600 (90%) Clinton 20,400 (10%)
And finally the 162,000 (Democratic) WHITE VOTES cast:
Obama 69,400 (42.8%) Clinton 92,600 (57.2%)
So there you have it. Clear as Mud. In the DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY held in Mississippi yesterday Barack Obama not only garnered 90% of the Black Vote, but he also drew 43% of the White vote. (By the way, Joe, Obama got 43% of the White vote in Georgia, too. That should make sense for you now.)
I still don’t understand why Chuck Todd has not been all over this. This information is right there in MSNBC’s own exit polling. Tweety did manage to point out that 24% of Hillary’s votes were Republican crossover votes, but for some reason he (and the rest of them—even Keith, who usually gets these things right) failed to connect the dots to get to the real numbers or at least to offer an analysis that takes this Rushbot, Dottohead, anti-democratic sabotage into account. There may not be anything we can do about this gaming of the system, but we have the tools and the brainpower to analyze it correctly. So why don't we?
Pity, pity,
Shame, shame,
The game goes on.