Hillary wins Pennsylvania - but why?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by a 10 per cent margin in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, even though he outspent her massively in the state. Why?

An exit poll conducted at 40 precincts across Pennsylvania for the Associated Press on election day found 16 per cent of white voters said that race mattered in deciding whom they voted for, and just 54 per cent of those voters would support Obama in a general election were he the nominee.

In fact, 27 per cent of them said that in that case they would vote for John McCain, while 16 per cent said they would not vote at all.

It's also interesting to note that barely more than a third of Clinton voters in Pennsylvania said they would be happy with Obama atop the Democratic ticket, whereas more than half of those backing Obama said they would be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee.

This is another sign that racism trumps chauvinism and misogyny in this race. Much of this contest has had nothing to do with "message" or "personality"- it is simply the colour of Obama's skin.

Since almost all African Americans in Pennsylvania voted for Obama - he won black-majority Philadelphia 65-35 per cent - and two-thirds of white women supported Clinton, the 'swing' vote that decided the race came down to white men, who went strongly for Clinton.

Clinton did particularly well among rural whites, traditionally less receptive to black politicians. She also got 70 per cent of whites who never went to college and 72 per cent of Catholics, many of whom are blue-collar workers of Irish, Italian and east European descent.

These are all people who have competed with African-Americans for jobs and housing in the big cities and sometimes see them as rivals.

Of course there are many reasons why all these groups might prefer Clinton to Obama apart from ethnic and gender issues. But in actual fact little separates the two candidates in terms of their overall ideology and platforms.

So if we discount these minute differences, what can we conclude? That many voters were saying, in effect, "better the white woman than the black man."

This is, needless to say, an oversimplification, but it's probably the "Occam's razor" answer. (This is the famous principle that states that the simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated ones, as propounded by the fourteenth century English friar William of Occam.)

And Hillary Clinton, while certainly no racist herself, is nonetheless making sure the super-delegates, who in the end will decide who gets the nomination, are made aware of this. Not above demagoguery, and using code language, she whispers to them that, despite having more delegates and a lead in the popular vote, Obama will be "unelectable" in the general election.

How different is this from a shopkeeper, in the days before there were laws against discrimination in hiring, justifying not employing blacks because "the customers wouldn't come into my store?"

This contest reminds me of those elections that take place in deeply divided societies.

How many Albanians would have voted for Slobodan Milosevic, or Serbs for the Kosovo Liberation Army, in pre-war Kosovo, had such an election been held?

How many Kikuyu in Kenya voted for Raila Odinga, a Luo, in last December's presidential election? And how many Luo voted for Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu?

How many Turks on Cyprus voted for Greek parties, or vice versa, before that island was partitioned in 1974? How many Israeli Arabs vote for far-right Zionist parties, and how many Israeli Jews would vote for Hamas or the PLO (were that an option)?

We know the answer.

In other words, such elections are merely "census counts" - you pretty much know the result in advance simply by looking at the population breakdown. In Pennsylvania, all of Obama's money couldn't change that.