More primaries and more damage to the Democrats

I’m watching the results from the Oregon primary come in, and it looks like Obama will win Oregon, while Clinton won another lopsided win in Kentucky tonight. I’m thinking about one of the most talked about, but less really focused on aspects of the exit polling from both West Virginia and Kentucky, and a somewhat disturbing bit of statistics keep coming back to what we have been hearing Clinton pound on for the last few weeks since Pennsylvania. She has sharpened her rhetoric that “working class whites” are voting for her, as a mantra to the super delegates that she is a more viable candidate against McCain in a general election. Her continual beating of the racial drum may have started to resonate with some of her constituency, and in doing so may be irreparably damaging the Democratic party in the process.

In Pennsylvania, 12% of the white voters that said that race was important to them, Clinton got 76% of the vote from that segment. In West Virginia, after campaigning for weeks that “white blue collar workers” were voting for her instead of Obama, 21% of white voters who said that race was important to them, Clinton got an overwhelming 84% of their vote. Now again in Kentucky, after another week of the same “white blue collar workers” are voting for her instead of Obama stumping, 18% of the white voters that said that race was important to them, Clinton got an even larger 88% of their vote. Not only has race shown to be a major factor in the campaign now, but it seems that Clinton has started to increase the wedge effect of race within her own voting constituency.

In the mean time to shore up her other core support base, Clinton has come out blasting the media for not showing the same concern over the sexist aspects of the campaign as they have been the race aspect. However, in the exit polling, on average, gender has no where near the direct block of voter impact that the growing percentage of whites who consider race to be an important part of their decision making is.

The Democratic party was always a loose coalition of factions, purporting to be the champions of the minorities, Blacks, Hispanics, Women, and the less affluent components of the American electorate. But what has happened during the Democratic nomination campaign, is that the party has fairly split itself along what can now be primarily viewed as racial lines, with Blacks voting for Obama, and blue collar whites voting for Clinton, and to a degree each voting block uses race as one of their major decision points.

Whether Clinton drops out of the race before the convention or not, is probably a moot point now. The damage to the Democrats may be irreparable, and to a large degree the fault for that has to lay firmly on Hillary Clinton’s side of the playing field. Her husband’s ill conceived words after the South Carolina primary, pretty much wrenched the traditional Black vote that she had counted on and drove it to Obama. Her recent, and continual beating of the “white blue collar workers vote for me” mantra over the last three or four weeks, has effectively driven an inescapable wedge between that Democratic group and Obama, that may not be able to be repaired.

Any way you slice it, and the Democratic pundits keep proclaiming that the Democrats will rally around the nominee, there may have been terrible damage done to the Democratic party base, that will probably not heal by November. And should the Democrats lose in November, the damage may be terminal to the party going forward.