South Carolina Speaks

A tad incoherently, better at sitting up, but it speaks

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
1/26/08

With results coming in on the first really important primary of this election season, Barack Obama has won by a startling margin, getting about double the vote of Hillary Clinton and all but ending the viability of the Edwards campaign.

Why is South Carolina important and Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan weren’t? Because SC has a more varied population, and it is also the first of the really deep red states to weigh in.

First, SC isn’t as red as it used to be. In the GOP primary last week, 442,918 voted for Republican candidates. The state has 2,495,750 registered voters. Nearly 525,000 voted in the Democratic primary.

The second thing we notice beyond the results themselves is that the exit polls show a huge discrepancy in voter gender. According to CNN, 61% of the voters were women, and only 39% were men. In the GOP primary, won by John McCain the week prior, the gender breakdown was 51-49 male. A difference of 51-49 for women in a state where males still dominate would have been enormous. Sixty-one percent is off the charts.

Now, the common wisdom was that women would vote for Hillary, and blacks would support Obama. So the lopsided gender vote should have supported Hillary, giving her a big win. Obviously, that didn’t happen. In fact, both genders voted for Obama at exactly the same rate: 54%. The only loser in the discrepancy was Edwards, who only got 16% of the female vote.

Blacks did support Obama, and in large numbers. About 78% of black voters voted for Obama. And the good old boys – whites over the age of 30, waren’t about to support no nay-gar. Obama only got about 19% of their votes, dwindling off to just 15% for the over 60 crowd. Grandpa Simpson with a bottle of whiskey might still watch Faux News, but he’s figured out that Republicans are bad for his health, both physically and economically, and so he’s going to vote Democratic. But to vote for thet boy – no matter how clean he looks – well, that’s a bit much to ask of a proud son of the Confederacy.

However – and this is huge – among white voters under the age of 30, Obama got 52% of the vote.

It’s worth noting that Obama exceeded expectations, which suggests that the phenomenon of “closet bigotry” that has shown up in some races where a black man was running against a white just wasn’t in play here.

All this adds up to a seachange in how the rest of the primary season might play out. It’s too early to even begin to guess what will happen ten days from now on Super Tuesday, but three things are clear: Hillary is no longer invincible; Obama -can- win the whole enchilada, and Edwards isn’t going to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

There were some weird discontinuities between voter perceptions of the candidates and how the voting played out. For example, when SC voters were asked which of the three candidates had the most empathy, the most ability to understand the needs of the common working man, John Edwards was the choice by an overwhelming margin, picked by more than Hillary and Obama combined. Hillary was last of the three.

The other startling one was about perceived experience. Hillary won that one going away, with Edwards a distant third, even though in fact, not only did Edwards have more experience in public life than the other two, but he had it representing the people of South Carolina!

One exit poll finding that spells trouble for Hillary Clinton was the question, “Who do you feel is most qualified to be Commander-in-Chief?” It’s a little unusual to have more than 10% of respondents name someone other than who they voted for. After all, they are as good as saying, “I voted for a candidate who I don’t think can do the job.” In any large election, you will have a few percent who are that dumb.

In Obama’s case, only 6% of voters who supported him thought someone else could do the job. Edwards had a startling 21% defection rate, with four out of five of the defectors saying Obama could do a better job.

Hillary had a staggering 28% defection rate, with 20% of her own supporters saying that Obama could do a better job.

So Edwards got clobbered in his home state, where he invested most of his efforts and money during the past six months. He’s toast. It’s pretty unlikely he’ll want to run as the vice-presidential half of the ticket again, but don’t assume that we’ve seen the last of him. He is bold, brilliant, and capable, and he will rise again.

So now it’s a two-way race for the Democrats, and Barack Obama has shown that he can win in the South, and he has shown unexpected strength in areas presumed to be Clinton’s: gender, youth, and capability.

A lot of people are wondering about Bill Clinton’s role in the campaign. Obama noted dryly in last week’s debate that sometimes he didn’t know which Clinton he was running against, and the truth is he’s running against both of them. But the very factors that make Bill Clinton such a formidable force for Hillary – his background as a successful two-term president, his ability to articulate and reach audiences, and his extraordinary charisma – also leave people wondering if he isn’t actually running for a third term. The campaign chants (discouraged somewhat belatedly by the Clinton staff) of “Eight More Years!” didn’t do anything to allay that perception. Bill needs to back off and let Hillary be the candidate. If he doesn’t, it will cost her, because as widely liked as he is, Clinton will alienate his own supporters if they have the idea that he’s trying an end-around sneak to get back in the Oval Office himself. Hillary has done an exemplary job of avoiding that up until now, and it’s up to Bill as to whether she continues to be seen as her own candidate or just a beard for Bill (so to speak). It’s impossible to envision Hillary as a willing puppet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be seen as dominated by her formidable husband.

As for Barak Obama, he’s arrived. Nobody can say he’s where he is despite anything. He’s won (“beat us, fair and square” as Bill Clinton observed from a campaign stop in Tennessee this evening) in the south, and in the mid west, and he’s shown he can hold his own against the Clinton machine, which this year is a far tougher test than anything the Republicans will be able to muster.

Super Tuesday doesn’t have a front runner. But it’s down to two candidates, and either one of them has what it takes to win in November.