Did her concentration on the gas tax holiday scheme help Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, or hurt her ?
Chris Cillizza looks at the numbers from Indiana:
While the exit polling didn’t directly touch on the gas tax issue, several loosely related questions seemed to indicate that Clinton did herself little good with her position. Among the two-thirds of Indiana voters who said that the economy was the top issue facing the country, Clinton won 52 percent to 48 percent. Compare that to her far wider margins among this bloc in Ohio (Clinton 55 percent, Obama 43 percent) and Pennsylvania (Clinton 59, Obama 41).
Among those Indiana voters whose family income is $50,000 or less (presumably the target audience for a temporary suspension of the gas tax), Clinton and Obama each took 50 percent, according to exit polling. Again, that is a weaker performance than Clinton posted in Ohio (Clinton 56 percent, Obama 42 percent) or Pennsylvania (Clinton 54, Obama 46) with that group.
On another pocketbook question, voters who said they had been affected “a great deal” by the deteriorating economy went with the winner in each state. Obama won that bloc by more than 20 points in North Carolina; Clinton narrowly edged Obama in Indiana.
Based on this, it’s hard to see how the gas tax holiday scheme helped Hillary and, given the fact that she actually lost ground to Obama among the groups that the proposal was targeted to, it’s arguably the case that her insistence on continuing the advocate the idea even in the face of unrelenting rejecting from economists on all sides of the political aisle actually hurt her in the end.
In the end, Clinton won Indiana — a state where she once had a nearly 10 point lead — by less than 20,000 votes. While the gas tax proposal may not have been the only reason for her fall, it sure as heck doesn’t look like the smart political move her campaign thought it would be.
