1. Black Americans are probably the most loyal or robotic Democratic voters, depending on how you view that phenomenon — into the nineties per cent.

2. If you are thinking of black American voters who are older and favoring Hillary Clinton, I would suspect they favor her for the same reason white Americans who are older are favoring her: because she is older and has more experience (or at least more notoriety).

In TX, voters who thought the race of the candidate was important actually split 50/50 between Clinton and Obama. However, in both OH and PA, race-is-important voters broke for Clinton, again at about 60/40. It's not clear what's going on. Do white voters in PA and OH think more along racial lines, while voters in TX do not? Possible, but Texas isn't exactly famed for its racial harmony. Another possibility is that people are thinking about the same in all three states, it's just that the demographics make it show in PA and OH, but not in TX. For instance, since African-American voters are going 80-90% for Obama, they would appear to be voting partially due to the candidate's race. Some whites in all states might be doing the same. There are simply more black voters in TX than in both OH and PA, and so the racially-motivated voting just balanced out in TX, while it did not in the other states. The Democratic voters in TX are only 50% of the electorate (about 20% black, 30% Latino), while it's 75 – 80% in PA and OH.

There's also a possibility that there's no cause/effect relationship between racial views and votes, just a correlation. The cause/effect hypothesis is obvious, and it's pseudo-assumed in my stuff above. Another possibility is that more people who, for instance, worry about the economy also think the race of the candidate is important, but they voted for economic issues, not race ones. The two ideas just happen to correlate.

Final thought: I would have to assume that there could be many thousands of voters who are more comfortable with a male president, just as there appear to be many thousands of voters more comfortable with a white president. But, oddly, I haven't seen it show up yet in the polling data. If people think gender is important, the majority go for Clinton.

I have heard many people make racist remarks in my life. A student of mine, a 19 year old college young woman, April, 2008!!!! told me that she hates when “People tease her” about being Jewish by making jokes about “The Holocaust” and her “Being cheap”.

We act as if people do not have prejudices, and nobody wants to say they do, but could it be that there is a much higher group of people who won't listen to, or vote for, Senator Obama because he is black than the group that won't vote for Hillary because she is a woman?

Why would Gun Owners flock to Hillary? If she is the candidate would PA voters favor her over McCain?

It would be nice if we could explore these issues honestly.

Here's the Economist article.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory….

Clinton will take Kentucky handily and I wager that Obama will have a slight edge in Indiana.