Exit Polls: Kentucky's 'Elites' Favor Clinton
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About Seth Colter Walls
Seth Colter Walls is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C. Previously he has worked for Newsweek magazine, MSNBC and Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper. He has a masters from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a graduate of New York University. He can be reached at walls@huffingtonpost.com.
My colleague Sam Stein reported yesterday that if Sen. Barack Obama wins Oregon as expected later this evening, the state's largely white and substantially working class demographic will have complicated the assumption that "white working class" voters have a monolithic problem with his candidacy. While we wait for Oregon's polls to close, though, we can already watch the corollary of that hypothesis unfolding in Kentucky, via its exit polls. Ladies and gentlemen: meet the hoity-toity, latte-sipping Clinton voter.
Voters making over $100,000 a year? They went 67-28 for Sen. Hillary Clinton, a four-percentage point swing from her 65-30 margin among those merely pulling down five figures annually. Fine you say, what about those post-structuralist literary theorists scraping through their Dickensian lives of ink-stained penury in the state's graduate English programs? Those PhD-track types are guaranteed Obamaites, right? Ah, well, that cohort went for Clinton by 20 points, too. Unfortunately, it seems the exit poll firm didn't ask Kentucky's primary voters whether they preferred wine over beer, though I'd be willing to bet you a PBR and a glass of Shiraz that Clinton carried both of those oft-cited voting "tracks" in Kentucky tonight. She won practically every category, including Iraq war opponents and young voters. Clinton even carried a third of the voting population in Kentucky that had judged her to be an out-of-touch liar (as determined by the negative "shares your values" and "trustworthy" responses, respectively).
Now, of course these numbers do stand in contrast to demographic splits from previous primaries in other parts of the country. When you win an entire state by 30+ percentage points, you have to carry a lot of sub-groups. But what about the battle between race and gender in the arena of discrimination? Responding to Obama's Iowa win back in January, Gloria Steinem famously advanced the hypothesis that gender "is the most restricting force in American life." But not among Bluegrass Democrats: Clinton came away with the support of 79 percent of those voters who said gender played a role in their vote. And while most of us can get behind pride in one's gender, "white pride" doesn't quite have the same ring. Among the similar proportion of voters who said race played a part in their decision-making, Clinton again managed to take a huge number: 81 percent.
May 20, 2008 09:16 PM