Clinton also won the college-educated vote in New Jersey and Massachusetts by about the same margins (50-47 and 51-47, respectively).  In Rhode Island it was 57-43 Clinton.  Remember that these were well before Wright and Ayers became big stories.  This says little if anything about a change in Obama's coalition.

And remember that these numbers usually come with a fairly high margin of error (MoE for a subset of a poll is always higher than for the entire poll), so it's pretty silly to be say that a shift of a few points compared to Ohio means anything.

I know John Judis is an expert in voting patterns, but this post and his previous article on the McGovern coalition similarities with Obama are full of underreported assertion that don't stand up to scrutiny.  "I am not prepared to look into the returns that closely?"  What is your job, John?  Come on!  If you're going to make broad assertions like Obama's coalition is collapsing based on one state's vote, give us the evidence!

Nothing against Judis--I could've said the same thing following Scheiber's post--but is anyone besides me contemplating suicide out of sheer boredom?  All of this stuff is so mind-numbingly trivial.  Suppose you're right, suppose Obama underperforms with white, university educated voters in November and McCain wins?  Or what if Scheiber's right and Obama does just fine?  What does it matter?  Roll up some extra hit points of political acumen to the winner's character sheet (a little D&D reference for the non-geeks among you).  

"What these results show is that Obama’s advantage among college-educated voters and voters with post-graduate degrees suddenly disintegrated in Pennsylvania."

"Suddenly disintegrated"?! Really? For this turn of phrase to be true, you would first have to establish that Obama had a larger lead among college-educated voters in Pennsylvania, and that he then lost a significant portion of that lead. Given that Obama steadily turned a 40-point deficit in the polls into a 9-point deficit over the course of four months, the idea that a core base of support "suddenly disintegrated" during that period seems unlikely.

When a person wins college-educated voters in Wisconsin or Virginia by a large margin, but then does not win college-educated voters in Pennsylvania, he has not lost his lead among college-educated voters as a class. He has failed to win them in one state. Both candidates have assembled slightly different coalitions of voters in each state. Such is the nature of our federalist system and our large, populous nation. People of similar demographic profiles have differing interests and voting patterns in different states due to the differing conditions of those states.

Which I only raise as a complaint because this is pretty basic stuff for understanding general-election campaigns, which are waged as a simultaneous series of individual state battles.

We are going to great pains to locate a demographic pattern in PA, but none ot the accounts I have seen on this site discuss the impact of Ed Rendell's endorsement of and energetic support for Clinton on the result.  I understand that he is immensely popular in PA.  Is it possible that Ed Rendell is the sole explanation for PA?

I think that we Obama supporters are becoming bitter and clinging to the idea that he didn't really hurt himself with his comments about Pennsylvania voters. To present oneself as a unity candidate and then demonstrate by his own words that his detached sociological view of cave dwellers and their flat earth perspective might reveal a convoluted and somewhat perverse empathy, the academia way. This is less than profitable and furthermore symptomatic of the schisms which contend at large.

Now I still have faith in the young man inasmuch that he has a potential by virtue of his unique station to stand for the better angels of liberal intention and thereby put to rest many political misunderstandings. That he has shown to misunderstand much himself gives me pause. Nuance can be the ambassador of clarity. It can also be a refuge from it.

As well, it is my hope that McCain has the capacity to disengage the red meat brigade within conservatism and show the better lights by which to navigate these crucial days.

As for the Clintons..... well, they can take their dog and pony show elsewhere.

It's all social pressures....in the states where candidates blow out their opponent, they collect a bit of their opponents' core support along the way. It's just the bandwagon effect...

This is why Obama did so well with working class whites in Wisconsin and overperformed with them in Virginia.

"Obama supporters are becoming bitter and clinging to the idea that he didn't really hurt himself with his comments about Pennsylvania voters"

Not this Obama supporter. Those remarks were devastating. But I'm pretty sure the damage will be in the general election. Most Dem primary voters are either (a) elitists or (b) non-elitists who are sick of being called elitists.

For the Obamaphile, even when admitting that his boy might have a problem, it's not his fault. In this case, Pennsylvania voters are delusional, that Obama's "association" with Wright is "in voters' minds".  Of course, Obama fans dearly want the BHO-Wright-Farrakhan nexus just to go away, but it will not, despite their idol's eloquent evasion, which they've desperately tried to depict as the second Gettysburg Address. (It's more like the Checkers Speech.)  It won't go away, not because O'Reilly won't let it but because, notwithstanding the wishful thinking of Jonestown-bound Obamaphiles, the nexus is real.

walto/aero - yes, it's tedious and depressing to watch the eternal cycle play out yet again as it has for the last three decades. Why can't the party of the working man nominate a candidate who connects with working families? Again, "connects with" equals understands their concerns intimately and puts them at the very top of his priorities; speaks to those concerns in language that is clear, respectful, engaging and persuasive; and demonstrates his willingness to fight for these top-of-mind concerns by taking on not just the usual suspects but also the identity-politics mindset that has hobbled our party's ability to turn around this nation's educational system and restore respect for public service provision.

Yeah, I'm tired of it too. You'd think that we'd have learned this lesson after Dukakis, Gore, Dean, Kerry...

What is happening is that the original euphoria for Obama among the upscale in the earlier primaries is being seriously mitigated by an accumulation of revelations.

A mosaic of Obama is forming.  The tiles are:  Rev Wright.  The Ayers Couple.  "First time I was proud of my country."  "Clinging to their guns and bibles."  And the slowly rising realization that Obama is well to the Left of most Americans and of anyone previously elected president.

High income, college educated people may consider themselves more open and enlightened.  But, most of them aren't Leftists.  And most of them do not have friends or acquaintances anything like Wright or Ayers.  

Hillary isn't undermining Obama.  Obama is undermining Obama.

boxofrox: love your epigram about nuance.

As for the discrepencies among educated voters, I'm increasingly persuaded by the Rust Belt vs. Midwest hypothesis. CT and Vermont aside, Clinton has dominated in the Northeast and Rust Belt, whereas Obama does better with voters, educated and otherwise, in the Midwest and Plains states. Look at Wisconsin, MO, Minnesota, Kansas, etc. Surely there must be some Localism at play.

Obama's has become the Midwest's native son, an adopted Illini and Kansan. Clinton is not only an adopted New Yorker. She is closely associated with Wellesley and all it represents. (That northeast advantage extends to FL, it seems to me.) In big states that fall outside those spheres of regional influence, e.g., Texas and California, the competition gets tighter and less predictable. The question I have about Indiana--and, hypothetically, Michigan--is which region holds the stronger sway? Is Indiana more like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois? Or more like Ohio? And I'm not really thinking about demographics. I'm thinking about regional and cultural identification.

Boxofrox: I think Obama's comments were damaging (how much, I don't know) -  but for you to say that Obama demonstrated "by his own words" a "detached sociological view of cave dwellers and thier flat earth perspective" is to fully buy in to the anti-Obama spin of his words.  I don't think his words demonstrated any such thing.  Taken in thier full context there was absolutely nothing "elitist" about what he said and no logical reason for anyone to be offended.  His "mistake" was in using the word "bitter" in such a way that it could be snipped out of context and used to beat him up with.  A good indication of how damaging the whole incident is is the fact that even a lot of Obama supporters are willing to accept the basic anti-Obama framing of what actually even happened.  

If anyone could go in for a close look at American politics over the last couple of decades and not feel their eyes sting at the waves of bitterness and resentment rolling in, they possess a stronger resistance than mine.

John Judis has an eminently reasonable post responding to my item about Obama and the Philly suburbs

tep, perhaps intentionally you have misunderstood the object of my frustration.  I'm not bored or frustrated with Obama.  I'm bored and frustrated with the professional and amateur punditocracy's continual efforts to tease out every last shred of information in an effort to handicap the horserace.  The horseracing analogy is entirely apt.  The pundits act like handicappers to whom it is entirely relevant what times a thoroughbred put up in his last three training sessions and whether or not it has shown any signs of a limp.  But as with horserace handicapping, the only value such info can provide is to increase the odds of one's picking the winner.  If you have a thousand bucks down on the outcome, the odds of rightly picking the winner are important.  If, as in the political case, you do not, then the odds of a correct pick r is of little value if any.  Were there still a real choice in the nomination fight, these electibility prognostications might still be worth something, but given that the nomination has effectively been decided, it is time for commentators to move on already.

And Obama's ability to speak and understand the language of the "working man" is leagues ahead of Dukakis and Kerry.  He has much more experience than either of them talking to "working men" in an effort to promote their goals.  The only hitch is that these were BLACK "working men."

Rhetorically speaking Obama has two registers: Harvard Law and the South Side.  The difficulty he may face is that his South Side rhetoric fails to connect with the white working class.  Nevertheless, I believe that his ability to UNDERSTAND the problems of working people, forged during his years as a community organizer on the South Side, is genuine, and of a different kind that either Kerry's or Dukakis's.  As to whether he can calibrate his rhetoric to appeal to rust belt whites, we'll see.  But painting him with the Kerry/Dukakis brush is misleading.  Obama is a different animal altogether, flawed perhaps, but flawed in new and therefore less predictable ways.

aeromonas, long before Obama was on the South Side, or even at Harvard, he was growing up in Honolulu.  And although he was going to a ritzy prep school, it was also where most of the middle class went because the public schools of HNL are unusable.

So, it's not like his background is either highly rarified or down with the bros in the hood.  He shouldn't be having so much trouble finding the middle.

Robert Kennedy, and even Jack Kennedy connected with the working guys.  So did FDR and TR.  All aristocrats of the American variety.

Obama's real problem is what he thinks.  He's not truly in sympathy with all those blue collar whites.  When he thought he wasn't being watched, he condescended to them.  

He may, frankly, look at them all as a lot of redneck crackers and trailer trash.  People have a way of picking up on that.

Boy, if Hillary Clinton can outconnect him with those people-- big phoney that she so obviously is-- shows you how out of it Obama is.

Frankly, if you watch him long enough, you realize he's a bit of a humorless stiff.  Hardly a Jack Kennedy, that's for sure.

Newdex. I have defended Obama in the face of what I consider to be reasonable concerns. I was well with him choosing to stay in his church and said as much. That wasn't even difficult for me. To an extent I can even honor such a decision as being an indication of worthy character even if accounting for growth from a previously held position. All said I count myself as being generous in this regard. I must view it as such in that I find it impossible to believe that Wright's convictions were a mystery and were somehow overlooked as part and parcel of his and the church's advocacy. I met Michelle Obama's comment with a degree of bemusement in that it can easily be construed as an extension of victimology which, given her history, doesn't fit with her circumstance. In my mind this is not something to be particularly admired even when justifiable. But he can't control his wife and what she says. Nor should he. He does, or at least should, own that which he says.

In my mind, all contextual suspicions and possibilities of his 'bitter and clinging' comments are unflattering and may well betray his true perspective regardless of any nuance which might further inform. Addressing a California klatch as to the origins and reasons for Pennsylvania irrationality and bent priority offends on many different levels. It IS detached even when you exclude the physical distance. Though that distance serves as a fairly good metaphor.

Barack Obama is a smart man and wonderful orator. It is a pleasure listening to him put forth. I believe it to be more than show business. He offers up a fairly good dose of substance and truth. While it is impossible and unreasonable to expect one man to be all things to all people, the propensity for changing hats to suit your audience diminishes trustworthiness to the extent of questioning said held convictions. Convenience or no?

Hey. The jury is still out for me but the evidence goes beyond spin. I'll use my own basket to gather, thank you.

"Frankly, if you watch him long enough, you realize he's a bit of a humorless stiff."

That's an idiosyncratic read if there ever was one.

"When he thought he wasn't being watched, he condescended to them."

That's just silly.  There was plenty of confusion in Obama's "bitter" statement, but nary a drop of condescension.  As muddled as his words no doubt were, the only reasonable interpretation as to what he was trying to say is that residents of small towns in western Pennsylvania have been harmed economically by our economy's shift away from smokestack industry; they've looked to successive governments, both Democratic and Republican for relief and have been repeatedly disappointed.  As a result they have become "bitter" and largely disillusioned with government, and tend now to base their voting decisions on somewhat secondary issues such as gun ownership rights and religion (read abortion).  This is a theory and is one that is open to attack on the facts, but to label it condescension is pure, unadulterated spin.

aeromonas, I think I am quoting pretty accurately:  When the economy doesn't come back, "...they become bitter.  And they cling to their guns, and their religion, and their fear of people who don't look like them, and of immigrants..."

That may sound perfectly apt to your ear.  To mine, it sounds damn condescending.

The economy has been very nice to me, thank you.  I don't own guns, and they're not on my shopping list.  I'm a cultural Christian, but not much of a churchgoer.  

I do, though, resent that politicians won't enforce our borders and that corporate interest leverage ultra cheap illegal labor to drive the American working class out of the middle class.  

I do resent that illegals have so flooded schools in states like mine (California) that unless you can afford private school your kid is now going to get a third rate or worse education.  Not Punahoe.  Not eligible for Harvard or Columbia.

I do resent that illegals have closed down hospitals and emergency rooms that can't pay for the floods them.  And I ain't no Deerhunter, aeromonas.  I live in a very posh neighborhood, awash in smug liberals who don't worry about what the old working class and middle class do, because they can afford private schools.  And, unless they're in a car wreck east of La Brea (here in L.A.) they won't worry about closed E.R.s

And as to "people who don't look like you," nobody rich or poor has a problem with people who live and act in a civilized manner, regardless of what they look like.  

When a large percentage of a given population evidences bizarre and criminal pathologies, yeah, people are a little more wary of such populations than they otherwise would be.  Jesse Jackson famously admitted he walks to the other side of the street when he sees a black teenager coming is way.  That's called racial profiling, Jesse.

Mike listens to right-wing talk radio on his long-haul overnight truck routes. I listen to NPR during

A couple of random thoughts heading into the May 6 primaries: 1.) There are four polls out today that

Looks like Obama has reclaimed his commanding lead among college grads tonight. If the exit polls are