Apr. 01

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News from the Votemaster

No April Fool's Day jokes like "John McCain died of a heart attack last night" or "Barack Obama surprisingly withdrew from the race this morning." Just politics as usual.

Progressive author David Sirota has an interesting observation about where Barack Obama has done well and where he has done poorly. He constructed the graph below, which shows how well Obama did as a function of the percentage of the population that is black.

What it shows is that in states with few blacks (like Wyoming and Idaho) Obama does well. In states with many blacks (like Georgia and Mississippi) he also does well. However, in states with a medium concentration of blacks (like Ohio and Tennessee) Clinton does well. What's the explanation? Sirota says it is race. In places like Wyoming and Idaho, race simply isn't an issue. There are so few blacks in these states that many people don't even know a black person, so race is simply not part of anyone's daily life. In contrast, in Georgia and Mississippi, it is a huge part of everyone's life, but since most whites are Republicans, blacks make up a very large percentage of the Democratic voters (often approaching 50%) and their overwhelming preference for Obama has carried him to victory.

The problem for him comes in the states with enough blacks that race is definitely an issue but not enough to affect the election much. This theory would predict Clinton victories in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky and Obama victories in North Carolina, South Dakota, and Montana. Some states are omitted for certain reasons (like the candidates home states). See the article for the details.

Politico has a report on what might happen in a credentials committee fight at the DNC if the seating of Florida and Michigan comes to that. If you did see yesterday's post here (with a link to Karl Rove's thoughts on how to manipulate a convention--a subject he knows well), check it out.

We have three new primary polls today, one in Kentucky, where Hillary Clinton has a massive lead over Barack Obama (58% to 29%) and two in North Carolina, where Obama has a smaller, but still solid, lead.

General election polls show Obama winning Washington state, losing Alabama, and in a statistical tie in Michigan and New Jersey. In the same polls, Clinton is similar, except for being slightly behind in Washington state. The details are on the general election maps linked to below the main map above.

The polling results for all primaries and caucuses are available as a Web page and in .csv format.

Here are the delegate totals from various news sources rounded to integers (Democrats Abroad has 22 delegates, each with 1/2 vote). The sources differ because in most caucus states, no delegates to the national conventions have been chosen yet, just delegates to the district, county, or state convention so there is some guesswork involved. Furthermore, some of the unpledged delegates are elected at state conventions in May or June. Finally, the PLEOs (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) sometimes waver and may tell different reporters slightly different stories that they interpret differently.

Delegates

Needed to win: Democrats 2024, Republicans 1191.

Here is another source for delegate totals.

WWW www.electoral-vote.com