Obama white vote exceeds expectations

Contrary to a previous poll showing him with support from only ten percent of whites in South Carolina, Barack Obama got a quarter of the white vote:

About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama. Black women turned out in particularly large numbers. Obama, the first-term Illinois senator, got a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.

Nonetheless, the racializing of Obama as the "black candidate" (see here and here, among many other things) spells trouble on Super Tuesday. Shame on the Clinton campaign and their surrogates for helping to bring us to this point.

Comments

[Rob]

Obama's white vote may have exceeded expectations, but that's putting a gloss on a very troubling fact. Obama received only 24% of the white vote. He ran last among whites. That should scare the hell out of Obama, with its implications for the remaining primary elections and the general. The Clinton strategy, loathsome though it may be, may have succeeded.

[Howard]

I don't think the Clinton strategy was responsible for his race or ethnicity - or for "scaring away white voters".

Guess what, prejudice does exist. As does a simple affinity for voting for a candidate who has a profile similar to your own.

Can Obama overcome that ? It will happen someday, perhaps in 2008.

Obama won across every other demographic (gender, age, income & education). That says something too.

[ikl]

No offense to South Carolina, but why are people extrapolating from the behavior of white voters in SC to the whole rest of the country? Nobody thinks that Edwards is going to get 35-40% of the white vote anywhere outside of the south on Feb. 5th, do they? So why are the rules different for Obama?

There is a new poll today showing that Obama leads within the margin of error in CO. Unless he is much, much more popular with Latinos there than in Nevada, I think that we can safely conclude that he is doing pretty well with white voters there (not that many blacks in CO).