As the votes are counted on primary night there are three realities: Senator Hillary Clinton has been favored to win in the Kentucky Democratic Presidential primary, Senator Barack Obama has been favored to win in Oregon’s vote — and a new poll indicates key groups that supported Clinton are now steadily moving over to Obama, which explains his recent 16 percent poll lead over Clinton.
It’s all part of the Democratic party’s slow but inexorable movement towards unity around the front-runner, who is still Obama. Here’s Gallup’s bottom line:
After nearly 20 grueling weeks on the campaign trail since he shook up the Democratic primary race by winning the Iowa caucuses, Obama has finally stretched his lead over his chief rival into the teens.
Having previously captured nearly the maximum level of support from black voters, Obama’s latest gains have come from a broad spectrum of rank-and-file Democrats. At least for now, he has expanded his position as the preferred candidate of men, young adults, and highly educated Democrats, and has erased Clinton’s advantages with most of her prior core constituency groups, including women, the less well-educated, and whites.
One notable change for Clinton: she now has less than 50 percent support from Hispanics — which as Andrew Sullivan points out could be due to her controversial comments about “white voters” supporting her.
Her most loyal group: women fifty years old and older:
The only major demographic group still supporting Clinton to the tune of 51% or more is women aged 50 and older. This group’s preferences have changed little during May, at the same time that Clinton’s support among younger men (those 18 to 49) has declined by nearly 10 points.
Some more details from the poll:
–Many groups that previously supported Obama (men, 18- to 29-year-olds, postgrads, and upper-income Democrats) now support him even moreso, in some cases by whopping margins. In other words: he has expanded part of his own base.
–Clinton has lost support among women, Easterners, whites, adults with no college education, and Hispanics.
–“The only major demographic group still supporting Clinton to the tune of 51% or more is women aged 50 and older. This group’s preferences have changed little during May, at the same time that Clinton’s support among younger men (those 18 to 49) has declined by nearly 10 points.”
What does this mean?
It likely means Clinton’s argument that is the most electable of the two is more tenuous than ever. If the argument was iron-clad, with Gallup poll numbers supporting her argument, you could project that she’d have a good chance of persuading more superdelegates to tilt to her.
But in this case, the numbers are not there to strongly bolster a powerful argument.
It’s all part of an unstated realization on the part of many Democrats that the race is over, even though the actual nomination isn’t until the summer and unforeseen events could alter today’s “given,” even if it seems “certain.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.