According to Patrick Healy of the New York Times, “racial considerations emerged as an unusually salient factor” in yesterday’s West Virginia primary. Do tell.

I’m not going to link to it, but if you want to check out the latest by Armando, he’s still ranting about the problem Senator Obama has with white working-class voters and how nobody wants to talk about it (although seems to me everyone is talking about it) and that this problem must be “addressed,” but of course Armando himself doesn’t address it (see Kyle Moore).

Before I go any further, I want to explain once again that I am from a small mining town in white working-class southern Missouri , so please don’t call be an East Coast elitist for what I’m about to say: For the record, I don’t think racism is the only factor causing older, poorer and less educated whites to prefer Clinton. I suspect the “less educated” part is at least as salient. These are, after all, the same people who through the years have voted against their own best interests time and time again because they are so easily manipulated by the Right. Just tell them that if Democratic Candidate X is elected the Democrats will take away their Bibles, and you can count on them to vote Republican.

In spite of yesterday’s blowout, I agree with Michael Tomasky that it’s unlikely West Virginia would go for the Democratic nominee in November, even if that nominee is Hillary Clinton.

Clinton people are positing West Virginia as a “swing state” of just the sort that Democrats have to win. But in truth, West Virginia isn’t much of a swing state at all. It’s basically a Republican state now at the presidential level. It’s remotely possible that if Obama (assuming he’s the nominee) chooses exactly the right vice-presidential nominee, and campaigns in just the right way, he could carry the state. But only remotely. The truth is that West Virginia quit being a swing state in 2004, or possibly even 2000. Even if Clinton is the nominee, if her people are counting on West Virginia’s five electoral votes, they’re barking up a tree that doesn’t have many branches they can hold onto.

And this – the fact that most Democrats expect to lose West Virginia in November – governs national Democrats’ emotional response to Clinton’s win tonight. The Obama people figure that they can hit 270 – the number of electoral votes they’ll need to capture the White House – without West Virginia.

Clinton supporters point out that no Democrat has won the White House without West Virginia since 1916. Tomasky says that 1916 isn’t relevant now.

That was the beginning of the union era in America. We are now in the twilight, at best, of that era – at least until a Democratic president changes that equation. But for now, Obama can win the White House without West Virginia. Clinton could, too, if she somehow became the nominee. She’d have to. But the emotional factor works against her tonight. Most Democrats just don’t expect that they can paint West Virginia blue.

Matt Yglesias writes, tongue in cheek,

What’s even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.

One of the reasons I support Obama is that he has the potential of putting together a whole new Democratic/progressive coalition that will entirely change the old voting patterns that, increasingly, work against the Dems. Senator Clinton continues to run a 20th-century campaign based on 20th-century assumptions, which is one of the reasons she’s losing.

Steve Benen writes,

For that matter, I’m not sure if the swing-state argument is the most compelling one for the Clinton team. Even if we designate West Virginia as a swing state (it’s a dubious proposition in light of Bush’s 13-point victory there four years ago), Obama seems to have just as strong a swing-state case to make, if not more so — he’s won Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The Obama campaign points out that, overall, Obama’s support among white voters is comparable to that of Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. That is to say, the white vote hasn’t been helping the Dems all that much for a while. Democrats really do need the African American vote, however, which Clinton is unlikely to get. I’m not sure if Armando has addressed that problem, however.

[Update: Now I see that Armando is smearing me by misrepresenting my point in the post below. He’s done that before, and not just to me. It’s a long-standing pattern. The boy can’t stand being disagreed with. Anyway, for any TalkLeft fans who drop by here, my point was not that it is “silly” to discuss Obama’s failure to connect with white working class voters. My point is that comparing data from the Virginia and North Carolina primary results without taking other factors into account is disingenuous. I’m sure Mahablog regulars understood that, as they can read.]

Oliver Willis sheds light on the dreadful weakness in Barack Obama’s candidacy that others lack the guts to discuss: Obama gets too many votes.

Brilliant snark, that.

Today many people are comparing Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail in which the Black Knight wants to keep fighting after his arms and legs are cut off. I think the analogy fits some of Clinton’s followers even more tightly than it does Clinton herself.

Pro-Clinton bloggers obsessively continue to look for chinks in Obama’s armor. One compares the North Carolina results with the Virginia primary of three months ago and notes, in classic concern troll fashion, that Obama has “lost support.” Why that might be is a complete mystery to the blogger, but the inference is that Obama is just plain running out of steam. Demographic and socio-economic differences between the two states,* plus the effects of Clinton’s ugly “kitchen sink” campaign, are not considered.

[*For example, 31.7 percent of Virginians have college degrees, while 23.4 percent of North Carolinians have college degrees. Obama tends to do better among college-educated voters.]

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the politician who lost both states in a rout would be a better general election candidate than the politician who, you know, actually won.

In fact, the politician herself is making the same argument (via Pam):

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Yes, and I think we see what it is.

Greg Sargent writes,

On the Hillary conference call, Hillary chief strategist Geoff Garin made the case for her electability in some of the most explicitly race-based terms I’ve heard yet.

Garin argued that the North Carolina contest, which Obama won by 14 points, represented “progress” for Hillary because she did better among white voters there than she did in Virginia.

Translation: Obama may get more votes, but we get better votes (wink, nudge).

Armando wrote a bitterly whining post about “the problem” he thinks no one wants to talk about — “Barack Obama has trouble connecting with white working class voters.” He does, but I think that’s been talked about quite a bit. I believe I even addressed it awhile back. Then Armando says,

Discussing that concern is a mortal sin according to the Left blogs. I for one will not play the ostrich. I will consider the problem and ways Obama can solve it.

And that would have been fine, but in fact Armando does not “consider” the problem or ways Obama could solve it. He just whines.

Kyle Moore:

Armando failed to actually discuss ways of solving it, or, for that matter, do anything besides complain about the perceived taboo of talking about Obama’s failure to appeal to White Voters, thus murdering the one saving grace of his post.

I hope Armando is ready to admit to the Clinton campaign’s colossal failure to appeal to black voters, which would be a more critical problem for a Democrat. As Steve M documents, Dems have been losing the white, male working class vote for a long time. For example:

According to CNN’s 1996 exit poll, Bill Clinton lost the white vote (Dole 46%, Clinton 43%, Perot 9%). He lost the white male vote by an even larger margin (Dole 49%, Clinton 38%, Perot 11%). And he lost gun owners badly (Dole 51%, Clinton 38%, Perot 10%). However, Clinton won the popular vote overall 49%-41%-8%, and he won 70% of the electoral votes.

Do the Clintonistas seriously think their candidate would do better with white, less educated, working-class men than John McCain will do in November? Or that Dems can win in November without the enthusiastic support of African Americans?

And the fact is that Obama has won some states that are nearly all white, such as Wisconsin. David Sirota talks about the “race chasm.”

Recall the Race Chasm graph that I published in In These Times a few weeks back. It shows how Hillary Clinton has been winning states whose populations are above 7 percent and below 17 percent black. If Democrats nominate a candidate who isn’t well supported by the black community, and that community ends up not turning out to vote in the general election in strong numbers, those states in the Race Chasm like New Jersey and Pennsylvania could flip to the Republicans, and other states in the Race Chasm like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and Virginia could remain in the Republican column (NOTE: I’m in no way saying that Clinton cannot eventually rebuild her support among black voters in a general election, just like I don’t believe Obama cannot strengthen his white support in a general election – all I’m saying is that Clinton’s current weakness among black voters is at least as important a factor in this election as Obama’s current weakness among some white demographics).

Put another way, the black vote – though only 12 percent of the total popular vote – can make the key difference in the key swing states, meaning Clyburn is absolutely right: It is not only subtly racist to generally downplay the importance of the black vote, but it is also mathematically absurd, because the black vote will likely be a decisive factor in the general election.

Call it the problem the Clintonistas don’t want to talk about.

Matt Towery of Southern Political Report says that Senator Obama’s North Carolina win was bigger than expected because he picked up most of the last-minute deciders. This tells us something about momentum, maybe.

Of Indiana, Michael Tomasky writes,

The narrow Indiana margin was a stunner and is worth dwelling on. How did that happen? It’d be lovely to think that substance may actually have had something to do with it. That is, it may have proved that Clinton’s pander on the repeal of the federal gas tax really didn’t work that well, and that Obama’s willingness to stand up and call it clever politics but bad policy actually persuaded a large number of voters. Maybe it proved that Obama finally found a way to minimise the pastor problem (for the time being – it will persist into November). Whatever it was, Clinton expected and needed a lot more.

This morning, most reports I’ve seen suggest she’s not quitting yet. The vanity campaign will continue. However, Todd Beeton writes,

This is-it-over or isn’t-it division echoes the mixed messages we’ve gotten from Hillary Clinton herself tonight. First there was her speech, which, I have to agree with Timmeh, was at once a rallying cry and a valedictory; in it, Clinton made an awkward and blatant plea for funds, yet the post-primary fund solicitation e-mail her campaign sent out this evening was more “thanks” than “please;” and finally we have the news that Hillary Clinton will hold no public events tomorrow, yet we also get word from Andrea Mitchell that her meeting with superdelegates set for the morning is purely routine and she intends to be back on the campaign trail by Thursday after a fundraiser tomorrow night. What all of this accomplishes, of course, is to keep both options on the table so that they can see how the fundraising goes and how the media spins tonight before deciding whether to stay in or to drop out. There is a third option as well, which I believe was proposed on MSNBC earlier, which would be to do a sort of combination of both, i.e. campaign strongly over the next two weeks but more as an ally of Obama’s than as a foe until May 20th when they both will likely once again end up winning a state and use his likely majority of pledged delegate status as the tipping point to bow out gracefully.

We’ll see. If Senator Clinton continues to run a scorched-earth, negative campaign against Obama, we’ll know she’s completely unglued.

There’s also speculation that the undeclared superdelegates will declare for Obama in the next few days. This could put an end to the nomination fight before June. Let’s hope.

Update: Dylan Loewe writes at Huffington Post,

Obama cut into Clinton’s base dramatically. Hillary only won voters making less than $50,000 by a four point margin in Indiana. She also saw an eleven point drop in support among Catholics from Pennsylvania to Indiana. Additionally, as Tim Russert noted, Hillary’s slide among black voters continued to worsen. With 92% of African Americans voting for Obama in Indiana, one wonders which states Hillary thinks are winnable without the most loyal bloc of Democratic voters.

All eyes turned to Indiana and North Carolina to see what impact the Reverend Wright story would have on the race. Exit polls showed that, in both states, 48% of voters saw the issue as at least somewhat important to their decision. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Among blacks in Indiana, 44% viewed the Wright story as important. And yet, more than nine in ten black voters chose Obama. With voters citing Wright as important, but still voting for Obama, it would appear that, in fact, Obama’s response to the Wright crisis played as important a role in voter decisions as the initial controversy itself. Given his success, he clearly responded well.

Indiana voters trusted Hillary on the economy, but by a far narrower margin than previous primaries. In North Carolina, Obama won that category handily, suggesting that the fight over Clinton’s gas-tax gimmick ultimately favored Obama – and honesty. At almost every turn, voters rejected the politics of Hillary Clinton. By a twenty point gap, voters believed Hillary unfairly attacked Obama in Indiana, a reality that has no doubt contributed to the widening divide within the party.

C’mon, superdelegates, declare for Obama and put an end to this farce.

Polls just closed in North Carolina, and the state already has been called for Obama. I don’t see the margin yet, but it can’t be very close.

Update: (Listening to Obama’s victory speech) That man sure can give a speech, huh?

Update: Indiana is still too close to call, MSNBC says, even though Obama pretty much conceded it and Clinton certainly accepted it. I’m not going to stay up to see final results.