A big win on a still narrow base
James Gimpel
Posted: 05.08.2008 / 6:04 AM EDT
Results tabulated from Tuesday’s election returns suggest that the principal differences between North Carolina and Indiana occurred in the two states’ “Monied ’Burbs” locations.
Barack Obama won a solid 66 percent of the vote in the counties classified as “Monied ’Burbs” in North Carolina, compared with a more modest 44 percent of similar counties in Indiana.
The suburban and larger cities in the two states are quite different. North Carolina has very little of the old-line manufacturing industries that dot the Hoosier State’s cities and towns.
And the Tar Heel State has a much larger black population (22 percent, compared with Indiana’s 9 percent), a windfall to Senator Obama’s candidacy given that exit polls suggest that black voters cast 92 percent of their votes for him and that they made up 34 percent of the North Carolina primary electorate. In Indiana, by contrast, they were similarly lopsided in their support, but they represented only 17 percent of the primary electorate.
Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), for example, has a large black population (about 36 percent), and nothing in Indiana compares – no, not even Lake County, Ind. (home to Gary and Hammond). At the same time, Charlotte is not a city built on manufacturing, but on trade and services. It looks more like a Sunbelt “Monied ’Burb” than it does an aging “Industrial Metropolis.”
Obama won a stunning 70 percent of the vote in Mecklenburg, a feat accomplished with the significant assistance of Charlotte’s middle-income black population – a population that is much smaller in Indiana’s “Monied ’Burbs.”
In most other respects, however, Obama’s base remained about as geographically narrow as it was in Pennsylvania, confined to large cities and college towns. Wherever there was a substantial population of blacks and white liberals, Obama won big.
But in all other locations, Hillary Rodham Clinton racked up impressive margins that are obscured by the overall statewide tallies. In both states, she won by double digits in the most rural areas (Tractor Country), towns with aging populations (Emptying Nests), and midsize towns full of service sector jobs (Service Worker Centers).
She also bested Obama in places where Evangelical churchgoers are prominent. He continued to do well among secular liberals and the well-educated.
North Carolina has some military-heavy areas that Indiana does not, and it appears that Obama won these areas, again, on the basis of their adjacent black populations more than through the support of active duty military personnel.
A chorus of voices is now calling for Senator Clinton to step aside. Nevertheless, if Obama becomes the Democratic Party’s nominee, these figures continue to raise the question of whether he will have crossover appeal in the myriad places where he was so badly defeated by Clinton. If she becomes the nominee, one wonders whether the traditional Democratic big-city and liberal base will come back on board.
