Below The Beltway

If the latest polls are any indication, Barack Obama is going to get crushed in at least two of the next three upcoming Democratic primaries.

First, of all every poll in West Virginia shows Hillary with a massive lead over Barack Obama:

And Clinton’s supporters in West Virginia are pushing ahead with their work despite the fact that her chances of winning the nomination seem slim at best:

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — They traveled here from New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana last week to stand in the rain on a rural street corner, at a four-way intersection of winding mountain roads. One woman, a doctor, took vacation time from her job to make the trip. Another, a mother of three, hired a babysitter for the first time in months.

The 10 volunteers, linked by a resolve to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign alive by helping her win Tuesday’s West Virginia primary, met to wave campaign signs patched together with duct tape. They cheered as the first car, a beat-up white Volvo, rolled toward the intersection, and a young man in aviator sunglasses leaned out his driver’s-side window.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re wasting your time?”

Clinton’s most loyal supporters — the ones still standing on street corners — have adopted their candidate’s motto, even as she trails Sen. Barack Obama by an insurmountable margin in pledged delegates: to fight like hell, despite dim odds and denigration, until someone officially wins the Democratic nomination.

The media usually talks about Obama’s dedicated supporters, but this seems to be a sign that, notwithstanding the increasingly slim odds of victory, the Clinton campaign has it’s own dedicated supporters and, as the L.A. Times notes, a big victory in West Virginia on Tuesday could be a problem for Barack Obama:

MOOREFIELD, W.VA. — In Hardy County, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1. But there is little enthusiasm for Barack Obama in this mountainside enclave, a portent of trouble for the Illinois senator in next week’s West Virginia primary and the general election beyond.

(…)

Obama may have emerged from his double-digit victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton in North Carolina and his razor-thin loss in Indiana on Tuesday with a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. But his performance did little to reassure political leaders here concerned by his sagging numbers among once-loyal white Democrats, who have steadily abandoned their party over the last several presidential elections.

At this point, a big win by Hillary in West Virginia isn’t going to mean very much in the race for the Democratic nomination, either mathematically or in terms of momentum, but the fact that large numbers of white working-class Reagan Democrat-type voters are not voting for him even at this point could portend trouble for his campaign come November. And while there are those who will try to ascribe this reluctance to racism, the fact of the matter is that Obama just hasn’t connected with these voters, and his remarks about the so-called bitterness of small-town America, his stand on gun control, and his ties to Jeremiah Wright don’t help him with those kinds of voters.

The West Virginia situation is mirrored in Kentucky, where Clinton also continues to hold a massive, double-digit lead:

Again, a big victory here is unlikely to have a major impact on the Democratic race, but it would signal yet another problem for Obama in November.

H/T: Liberal Values