Last night’s numbers from Wisconsin were not especially good for the Clinton campaign:
[Y]esterday the senator from Illinois broke deep into Clinton’s base in Wisconsin. He solidified gains he made in last week’s Potomac Primary, proving competitive among some key Wisconsin voting blocs that had been backing the senator from New York and overtaking her among others.
“He’s making a real assault on the Clinton coalition for the first time,” said Mark Mellman, an independent Democratic pollster whose Wisconsin clients date to the 1980s.
In a state in which nearly 9 in 10 Democratic voters are white, Obama won more than 6 in 10 of the votes of white men, while Clinton held only a narrow edge among white women. And he defeated her by double-digit margins among those voters with family incomes less than $50,000 and among those without college degrees, exit polling shows.
(…)
Obama blunted Clinton’s margins among some of her most reliable voters. Clinton held only a narrow edge among white women in Wisconsin — of the 24 previous contests with Democratic exit polls (not counting Michigan), Clinton beat Obama by double-digit margins 19 times and lost by that wide a margin in only one, Obama’s home state of Illinois.
Obama also beat Clinton among those voters concerned about the nation’s economy, and divided the vote of union members evenly. “If those things hold true, then this could be a significant turning point,” Cieslewicz said.
Let’s wait a day or two and see how Ohio is polling now, I suspect that Obama will have closed the lead significantly.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:50 am
[…] Clinton continues to lead in most polls in Texas and Ohio, but those leads are slipping and they’re likely to slip some more now that Obama has one ten primaries in a row and shown that he can win the votes of groups that Clinton counted on as hers. […]
February 20th, 2008 at 10:00 am
[…] Clinton continues to lead in most polls in Texas and Ohio, but those leads are slipping and they’re likely to slip some more now that Obama has one ten primaries in a row and shown that he can win the votes of groups that Clinton counted on as hers. […]