Whatever data this chart about yesterday’s Kentucky primary voters is trying to present isn’t clear to me, so I’m going by the interpretations in the comments. But apparently about 14 percent of those who cast votes in Kentucky for Clinton yesterday plan to vote for McCain in November.

Put another way, 16% of yesterday’s Kentucky primary voters said they’d vote for McCain in November. Of those, 55% went to Hillary and 28% went to Obama.

A commenter:

One useful thing from MSNBC’s exit polling: of yer white Kentucky Democrats earning under $50k p.a., about 37% voted for Bush over Kerry, and 30ish% voted for Bush over Gore.

So the 34% who said they’d vote for McCain over Obama really are just the same people who, while registered as Democrats, almost always vote for a Republican president.

Another commenter:

It’s also interesting that Obama did better, percentagewise, amongst white Independents than white Democrats. Unsurprisingly, amongst whites who said race was important to their voting decision, 88% went to Clinton. People who voted for Clinton tended to believe that Obama shares the views of Wright; the converse is true as well. Both sides will be dissatisfied if the other candidate wins the nomination, but Clinton has 53% of the voters who don’t like *either* candidate (Obama has 13%).

So, basically, Clinton did well amongst voters who prefer McCain, voters who don’t like either Democratic candidate, and whites who voted significantly based on Obama’s being black. That’s a hell of an electoral coalition right there. I assume we’ll be hearing McAuliffe tout it real soon now.

Michael Tomasky:

The folks on television, for the most part, were a little too obsessed with Kentucky. They had air time to fill, so it’s understandable, but the fact of the matter is that Kentucky is irrelevant for November. So is West Virginia. They’re not battleground states. Battleground states are places where the two Americas, red and blue America, meet and fight for dominance. Ohio, obviously; Pennsylvania, sure; many Midwestern states, several Rocky Mountain states, two or possibly three southern states, arguably Oregon and Washington. But Appalachian states are not in conflict. They’re red. Lots of pundits don’t understand this yet. It wouldn’t matter if Obama lost Kentucky by 80 points.

There was much hand-wringing on television last night over why Obama did little campaigning in West Virginia and Kentucky. My guess is they decided that pouring millions of dollars into those states probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome all that much. Save the money for the general election.

Tomasky again:

Yes, there will come a point at which Clinton continuing to fight will look increasingly ridiculous. But even so, the Obama campaign and the media and maybe even the Democratic National Committee will say, “Look, he’s got 2,026; he’s won.” But the Clinton camp will say, as it has been saying, something like, “We don’t regard 2,026 as a real number. We say 2,209 is the number. And he’s not there yet. And we’re ahead in the popular vote, if you count Outer Freedonia and Inner Seutonia, as any rational person would. So we’re ahead. And we challenge Senator Obama to say otherwise.”

What happens then? Do the networks and cable channels literally stop inviting Clinton people on their air, because they’re just making fools of themselves? Of course they don’t. They want ratings, and conflict means ratings. And people willing to make fools of themselves on television definitely means ratings! Do the newspapers weigh in with haughty editorials saying, enough already? Sure they do. But does Clinton care about that? So what? What’s a newspaper editorial? Maybe if The New York Times actually withdraws its endorsement. But as long as she’s not directly attacking Obama, that seems a reach. Jokes by Leno and Letterman? She’ll just go on there, read a Top 10 list. All will be forgiven. Ratings.

Even if she’s not attacking Obama directly, I think she’s undermining his general election chances in other ways. By means subtle and not-so-subtle, Clinton is picking up the Appalachian vote by providing positive reinforcement to the worst impulses of the one demographic she can still call her own — white working-class non-urban voters who live in states in which the African American population is above 6 percent but below 17 percent of the total. (See David Sirota’s Race Chasm Theory.)

That little slice of Americana is giving her primary wins in states that will almost certainly go for McCain in November, no matter who the Democrats run. But by appealing to those voters she’s cultivating the negative talking points the GOP is already picking up to use against Obama — that he’s an “elitist,” for example.

The big “blue” states that Clinton won, like California, she won early, while she was still Ms. Inevitability. If the California or Massachusetts primary were held today, would the results be the same? I doubt it.

Sasha Abramsky:

As I wrote last week, the Democratic party’s presidential primary race is, to all intents and purposes, over. Obama’s going to be the nominee. Yesterday, voters in Kentucky gave Clinton another big victory – but at this point these victories are pyrrhic. They don’t help Clinton, but they do push the toxic issue of race ever more to the fore, which is a shame given Bill Clinton won the presidency, at least in part, because of his tremendous appeal to African American voters. Clinton might argue she hasn’t stoked this, but the argument’s a stretch. She’s explicitly said she is the candidate of “hardworking Americans, white Americans”. To win the southern states with the smallest African American populations, she has crafted a message of “electability” that is vaguely coded language for “I’m white”. It’s a shameful denouement to a largely honourable, and at least generally progressive, career.

And it’s all an act. She’s no more “one of them” than she’s a carrot.

So, here’s what I’d like to see coming out of Oregon. Sometime in the next couple weeks, the Clintons will have to bow to the inevitable. They need to find a graceful exit strategy and then set to work for the Obama candidacy. Both Clintons have shown their power to sway southern white voters. Now it’s time for them to put their political capital to good work. If the Clintons genuinely care about their progressive legacy, they’ll tackle the race genie head on. It’s out in the open now – if it wasn’t before, certainly it is after the polling in West Virginia and Kentucky. It’s one thing for Hillary Clinton to play dirty to win primary votes; it’s another thing if she doesn’t try to repair the moral damage after the primaries are over.

Clinton has pandered to the conservative Appalachian vision of America for weeks now. It’s time for her to recognise the country will be a healthier place if the message sent out by Oregon’s colour-neutral electorate proves more durable than that sent out by Kentucky’s voters. This isn’t about who wins more delegates; it’s about how those delegates are won and at what moral cost.

In Clinton Land, only sexism counts. Last night on MSNBC someone from the Clinton campaign was being interviewed on MSNBC, and she was going on about how Barack Obama needs to speak out about sexism, and the interviewer — might have been Tweety — asked if Clinton was going to speak out about racism. And the Clinton campaigner sputtered and shuffled and clearly was caught off guard by the question.

The difference between the two campaigns, IMO, is that while there is all kinds of blatant sexism and racism out there –some of which is being expressed by partisans on both sides –I don’t see the Obama campaign cultivating sexism to win votes. I do, however, see the Clinton campaign cultivating racism (and one hell of a victim complex) to win votes.

Let’s be clear. The Dems cannot win in November without a strong turnout by African Americans. I think they can, however, win without the “white working-class non-urban voters who live in states in which the African American population is above 6 percent but below 17 percent of the total” vote. That’s why Kentucky is irrelevant.

And the Clinton campaign already looks ridiculous to everyone but her die-hard supporters. She’s become a caricature. For those of us who defended her for years against the ravings of the Right, this is terribly sad.