So says ABC News:
7 pm ET: ABC IS CALLING THE RACE RIGHT AT POLL CLOSING TIME. From our decision desk: "Based on exit poll data, ABC News projects that Obama will win the South Carolina Democratic primary. We do not yet have enough information to project who will be second or third, but based on the exit polls Clinton is leading over Edwards in a race for second."
This would SUGGEST a large margin — networks don’t call races based only on exit polls unless it’s pretty convincing.
CNN has called it too. And their exit polls show Edwards narrowly winning the white vote, with Obama getting a “healthy” 25%.
Among black men: Obama 80%, Clinton 17%. Among black women: Obama 82%, Clinton 17%.
Edwards got almost zero black support, which is why Clinton will probably beat him overall despite narrowly losing the white vote to him.
The full CNN exit poll results will eventually be here, but they’re not yet.
As the actual votes come in, you’ll be able to see them at CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the South Carolina Democratic Party.
UPDATE: CNN’s exit poll still isn’t online, but MSNBC’s is, and extrapolating from the gender numbers, it looks like a huge win for Obama, to the tune of Obama 55%, Clinton 27%, Edwards 18%. Which raises the question: would a 25-to-30-point margin of victory be enough to offset the potential P.R. damage from the bloc voting issue? Especially given that Obama got a quarter of the white vote?
UPDATE, 7:39 PM: CNN now projects that Clinton will beat Edwards for second.
If Edwards does end up below 20% in the state of his birth, which he won in 2004 with 45% of the vote — beating ascendant front-runner Kerry by 15 points — does he still keep his repeatedly promises to stay in the race all the way to the convention? I get the “kingmaker” thing, but where will the money come from? And won’t this charade become humiliating exercise at some point soon? And isn’t the media soon going to start totally ignoring him — leaving him out of debates, etc.? It’s completely obvious now (if it wasn’t after Nevada) that this is a two-way race. With the probable exception of North Carolina, I bet this is the last time Edwards polls in double digits.
UPDATE, 9:06 PM: CNN estimates the delegate count from South Carolina as Obama 8, Clinton 4, Edwards 2. All this for a four-delegate edge? Heh.
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Categories: Election 2008
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January 26th, 2008 at 8:31:28 pm
Seems to me like the Clinton attack machine has backfired, at least for now. I think Americans are tired of the negative campaigning. And whatever you want to make of the whole Obama “race baiting” thing from a while back, the fact is the Clintons have made the politics of personal destruction their main strategy for winning the nomination. I hope the size of Obama’s win and Edwards’ eventual departure from the campaign trail will give Obama a legitimate shot of winning the nomination. I can’t stand Hillary and her Rovian tactics.
January 26th, 2008 at 8:59:49 pm
Do the exit poll numbers strike anyone else as a little bit odd? On the Republican side in SC, the exit poll was 51/49 male/female. For the Democrats, it’s 39/61. Are there that many more women who vote in SC than men?
January 26th, 2008 at 9:05:46 pm
HRC lost the battle for sure, but her war strategy is affirmed. 75-25 support amongst whites augurs well for her prospects generally and nationally.
Identity voting, and therefore politics, has rarely been so well delineated and exposed as in the SC primary. I am overwhelmingly grateful that it is in the context of Democratic politics than GOP. The truth is that this phenomenon cuts across all political divides, but at least I don’t have to hear about the eeeeeevil and racist fundamentalist Republican electorate.
HRC is our next president absent gross, and I mean GROSS, changes and developments that nobody would wish to speak of.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:10:37 pm
Max - It just reflects the gender split between the parties. Dems had more female voters in NH and MI too.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:11:40 pm
75-25??
Make that 40-25. Edwards got 35. Edwards and Hillary share the same skin color, but last time I checked, they’re not the same person.
Obviously, Hillary would not have gotten 100% of Edwards’s 35% if he weren’t in the race. If Edwards’s votes split down the middle, it’d be 57.5 to 42.5. In reality, it probably would have been at least 60-40, maybe 65-35. But certainly not 75-25.
I fear you’re probably right in your big-picture conclusion (Hillary beating Obama), but don’t get ahead of yourself with the numbers.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:14:04 pm
Well, I was the one who asked about the gender disparity, not Max. But while I’m used to R races showing more male voters and D races showing more female voters, it’s the one-sided nature of the gender disparity that surprises me in this one. It happened in Nevada as well, but in other states where I’ve looked at exit poll data, disparities tend to be much closer to being reciprocal–a 57/43 split in one matched by a 44/56 split in the other. With the R primary being 51/49 and the D primary being 39/61, either there must have been way fewer people voting in the D primary, or else there must have been way more women voting overall than men.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:21:29 pm
Watching Obama’s speech - when Barack says that couples should be able to retire with dignity - is he talking about Bill and Hillary?
;)
January 26th, 2008 at 9:22:05 pm
Oops. sorry Mike.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:22:55 pm
I’m not sure how you weigh exit polls without using a proper demographic representation of the voting populace - period. It seems like it would be a very difficult thing to do to come up with x-percent women or y-percent of black voters outside the normal demographic make-up of potential voters based on only one day of exit polling. What am I missing here?
January 26th, 2008 at 9:23:10 pm
While that could be the case, it wasn’t that way in IA, NH, or MI, where the disparities were within a percentage point of being reciprocal. IIt could be the case for NV, though, where the Rs were 52/48 and the Ds were 41/59–I haven’t found out how many people participated on each side in that one yet.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:23:22 pm
Ed, the reason race is never an issue in Republican presidential primaries is because you can choose an old white man, or you can vote democrat.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:26:08 pm
By the way, the polling data I saw on CNN shows white males in their 20s and 30s voting in large percentages for Barack. I think generational considerations may play a bigger role in the primaries than race or gender. For instance in Florida, which doesn’t count for the Dems this time, Hillary could be expected to do very well because of the percentage of older voters while Obama might do surprisingly well in younger California. This said, graying Midwestern states, with the exception of Iowa, of course, could be biased toward Hillary. It will be interesting to see.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:26:16 pm
Dangit, Brendan deleted his comment so now my previous one makes no sense. Basically, I was responding the notion that far more women are coming out to vote than previously, in anticipation of voting for the first woman president of this country. That could be the case here in SC, though I’d need to see overall vote totals on the two sides before people able to conclude that there were significantly more women voting than men–but it’s not consistent with 3 of the other 4 states to have held primaries/caucuses for both parties.
January 26th, 2008 at 9:49:31 pm
Sorry, Mike. I thought better of my comment almost immediately after posting it, and didn’t think anyone would have seen it in the ~30 seconds it was online. Heh.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:29:41 pm
obama spiked from about 30% to 37% on intrade after the primary tonight. maybe this is a race again.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:39:03 pm
Yeah, Sandy, Mike Steele and Lynn Swann were terrific Dem gubernatorial candidates in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Oops.
BO got 25% of the vote, and if the pundits are to be believed, Brendan, there was a serious expectation amongst the cognoscenti that he would only manage 10% today.
HRC and WJBC will play the race card all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania. Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps all the high and mightily principled Dem voters will sit out the general in protest of such tactics. Maybe this will be the rejection of the politics of personal, racial, and gender destruction.
Lord, how I am loving this.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:41:00 pm
Further proof that Intrade is purely reactive when it comes to this presidential race.
I’d like to think Obama has a chance. But barring a major Hillary gaffe, I have a feeling she will pick up significantly more votes, states and delegates on February 5 than he does. What Obama had going for him in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina (yes, he lost NH, but he gained massive ground in the polls compared to where he started a few months earlier) was that, the more voters get to see Obama, the more they like him, and the more they get to see Hillary, the more they dislike her. A quick, media-driven and TV-ad-driven blitz across multiple states simultaneously is much more favorable to Hillary than the intensive, door-to-door battles in places like IA and NH.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:43:21 pm
Ed, I’m still waiting to hear how you derived your 75-25 statistic. And how exactly is it a strike against Obama that he did 250% better among white voters than the “serious expectation amongst the cognoscenti” suggested he would? On the face of it, getting 25 percent in a three-way race is not exactly a badge of enormous shame.
I think Obama will probably lose, but let’s see what the voters say on Super Tuesday. This white voter in the South will be backing Obama, I can tell you that much.
January 26th, 2008 at 10:45:14 pm
i think obama has a chance because even if hillary has big wins in super tuesday day, she’ll likely only get 2/3-3/5 of the delegates. if hes still viable after that, which the current projections show he will be, states like penn/ohio will get a lot of attention and we might see obama surges again.
January 26th, 2008 at 11:38:53 pm
BL - per Michael Barone, BO got 25% of the white vote today.
January 26th, 2008 at 11:41:45 pm
-add-
In no way is this a mark of shame for BO. He has run a first class campaign.
It IS a shameful time for voters - in this case Dem voters.
January 26th, 2008 at 11:44:32 pm
BO got 25% of the white vote today.
Right, Ed. But you didn’t just say that Obama got 25%. You said “HRC lost the battle for sure, but her war strategy is affirmed. 75-25 support amongst whites augurs well for her prospects generally and nationally.” Hillary Clinton did NOT get 75% of the white vote. She got 40%. As I wrote at 9:11 PM: