HILLARY CLINTON’S defeat in the West Virginia primary yesterday
followed a trend in this year’s Democratic primaries: the front-runner
has been losing to Bernie Sanders in states without sizeable numbers of
blacks and Hispanics. West Virginia used to be Clinton country (for Bill
at least). But states where whites make up the vast majority of
Democratic voters, such as Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma and now West
Virginia (where 91% of the voters were white), have plumped for Mr
Sanders. Overall, white voters have split their support almost equally
between the two candidates (though Mrs Clinton has done slightly worse
among whites outside the South). But Mrs Clinton has done poorly with
white men. She took just a third of their vote in Illinois and Michigan,
for example, compared with half the votes of white women in those
primaries.
In the states where exit polling breaks down the
numbers by sex and race, Mrs Clinton has won on average 44% of the white
male vote compared to 56% for Mr Sanders. As the front-runner in the
Democratic contest she appears to be doing much worse among white men
compared to 2004, when John Kerry won the party’s nomination. Mr Kerry
took 53% of the white male vote in the Ohio primary, and in a crowded
field of candidates, whereas Mrs Clinton got only 42% of their vote in
this year’s two-horse race. In New York Mr Kerry won 58% of white men;
Mrs Clinton got the support of just 43%, in a state that she had
represented in the Senate for eight years.
The data are not sufficiently detailed to allow us to correlate
sex and race with social indicators, such as income and education. It
could be that the white men stubbornly voting for Mr Sanders are
college-educated professional types, who might switch to the Clinton
camp in November. But if they are disgruntled workers amenable to a
populist rallying cry against the Washington elite, might they be
tempted by Donald Trump? Mrs Clinton has not been doing well either on
another measure: whites (men and women) with no college degree. Outside
the South this group has been favouring Mr Sanders. In West Virginia,
where they accounted for well over half the vote, just 35% of them
backed Mrs Clinton.
