Democrat Primary Demographics, Not Race But Arugala

In one of the best examinations of the demographic breakdowns of the race between Hillary and Barack that I have seen Noemie Emery looks not at race but at acedmicians versus Jacksonians in this must read piece that I would say is a quite accurate portrayal. While I am sure there is a handful of whites that won't vote for Obama based purely on his skin color there are far more that are voting for him for precisely that reason despite his far left policies. This explains a lot of Obama's support by elitist academic whites in college towns and blacks in large cities and lack of it among the more rural or working class voters. Barack does come across as an aloof academic elitist that speaks in flowery abstract terms of hope and change while running from the press or tough questioning while Hillary did manage to come across as more down to earth and more willing to engage the average voter thus her overwhelming wins in West Virginia and Kentucky late in the process.
There are currently two schools of thought on this divide as Emery points out, one is the left wing MSM's narrative of racism and I expect them to stick by it for the rest of the campaign and beyond.

School number one thinks it reflects racial hostility that Obama's opponents--first Hillary Clinton and now John McCain and the Republican party--are doing their best to rub raw. This is a case that Democrats have been making for the past 30-plus years, and its most recent airing came in a long piece in the May 19 Newsweek by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. "The real test is yet to come," they warned. "The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower-and-middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower and middle-class whites in industrial and border states--the Democrats' base from
the New Deal to the 1960s, but 'Reagan Democrats' in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as 'the other'--as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots."
In this view--let us call it the Newsweek Doctrine--race is the issue, and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson did the Right Thing, signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and consigning his party to electoral darkness by losing the South for the next several eons. By these lights, bigotry and fear are the main factors, and all the others are thinly masked surrogates for them. If Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and of the press that supports it.

Then there is the view that I think is more accurate which Emery advances from Michael Barone's analysis of the exit polling data.
The second school of thought admits the presence of bias as a contributing factor, but not the most important one. The real cause, it thinks, is a cultural divide among whites that splits them on matters of worldview and attitude into hostile and competing camps. Let us call this rival approach the Barone Manifesto, after its author, political analyst Michael Barone, who crunched the poll numbers for Obama's primary battles with Hillary Clinton and discovered that while the former did exceedingly well with white voters in university towns and state capitals, he did poorly almost everywhere else. From this, Barone broke the electorate down into two large divisions--academics and state employees who live in these places, whom he calls Academicians, and Jacksonians, who live elsewhere, especially in the regions close to the Appalachian mountains.

This also explains why the expected huge jump in the polls after Obama sealed up the Democrat's nomination never came and why McCain still remains within the margin of error despite this being by all accounts a Democrat election year. Meanwhile the Democrat lead Congress of Pelosi and Reid is attempting to squander whatever other advantages the Democrats had this year by doing nothing but spend, obfuscate and garner the lowest approval rating in history.