Remember all that drama about how Obama would not be able to win the big states that Clinton won during the primaries? You know, states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida, etc.
Well, since the election is over, I wanted to go ahead and look through the various states that Obama and Clinton won during the primaries and see how Obama performed.
First off, here are the Obama primary wins and the Clinton primary wins:
Clinton States [Won 73% of 311 electoral votes]
Obama States [Won 61% of 227 electoral votes]
Turns out that Obama won 73% of the electoral votes (227) from states that Clinton carried during the primary and 61% of the electoral votes (138) from states that he carried during the primary.
The only Clinton states Obama lost were:
As you'll notice, none of those states were seriously targeted by the Obama campaign (AZ and SD were targeted to a small degree, but that was late in the game).
Moving to Obama, the only primary states he didn't carry during the general election were:
Of those, only Missouri and Georgia were seriously targeted. North Dakota and Montana were also targeted, but again, to a much less degree than the others. Of course, I'm assuming that McCain's slim Missouri lead holds. If Obama somehow manages to win that state, then the number goes from 61 to 66 percent.
Now, lets look at the Clinton primary states that Obama carried:
Once you start looking at the data, you'll begin to realize just how flawless a campaign Obama ran. What's amazing is with how much ease he carried those Clinton states. So let's take a look at the margins of victory in the Clinton primary win states.
Note: By way of comparison, I've included the 2004 numbers in parenthesis, as well as the 1992 numbers from the Clinton/Bush/Perot contest:
Rhode Island - +28% (+20) (+18)
Massachusetts - +26% (+25) (+19)
New York - +25% (+18) (+16)
California - +24% (+10) (+13)
Michigan - +16% (+3) (+8)
New Jersey - +15% (+7) (+2)
New Mexico - +15% (-1) (+9)
Nevada - +12% (-3) (+2)
Pennsylvania - +11% (+2) (+9)
New Hampshire - +9% (+1) (+1)
Ohio - +4% (-2) (+2%)
Florida - +2% (-5) (-2)
Indiana - +1% (-21), (-6)
Changes from 2004: +8 in RI, +1 in MA, +7 in NY, +14 in CA, +13 in MI, +8 in NJ, +16 in NM, +15 in NV, +9 in PA, +8 in NH, +6 in OH, +7 in FL and +22 in IN.
Changes from 1992: +10 in RI, +7 in MA, +9 in NY, +11 in CA, +8 in MI, +13 in NJ, +6 in NM, +10 in NV, +2 in PA, +8 in NH, +2 in OH, +4 in FL and +7 in IN.
Amazing.
By the way, I would have used embedded Daily Kos maps, but they weren't working for some reason, so I settled for the Washington Post electoral maps.