We've heard a lot this week about Bill Clinton's sojourn to rural North Carolina to scare up votes for Hillary--his sunburnt face certainly attested to it tonight. But the initial results don't look so promising. According to the exit polls, Obama won rural North Carolinians by a 52-45 margin.
Now, obviously, some large fraction of those rural voters were black, and were always going to be hard to pry loose. We can't really pass judgment until we see numbers for white rural voters alone. Still, something tells me the Clintons were hoping for a little better than that when they drew up the Bubba plan.
--Noam Scheiber