Bi-racial Coalition Carried Obama to South Carolina Landslide

SAVE AS FAVORITE

VIEW FAVORITES

By Erik Ose (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

The minute S.C. polls closed, major news organizations immediately called the race for Obama, based on exit polls showing his huge win. He ended up with 55% of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 27% and 18% for John Edwards.

As the shape of Obama's victory became clear, the Clintons (and reporters who fell for their race-baiting spin) were left with egg on their faces. Obama won more than twice as many votes as Clinton. He beat Clinton among independents by 40% to 23%. He carried black voters by a 4-1 margin.

But he also won a quarter of white voters, far more than the 10% forecast by pre-election polls. He won a majority of white voters under 30. He won nearly as many white men as Clinton. Obama probably would have done even better among white voters without S.C. native son John Edwards in the race, who took 40% of the overall white vote.

Carol Fisher, a middle-aged white voter from Greenville, South Carolina, explained her vote for Barack Obama when interviewed outside the polls. "I was just voting for, to me, the most attractive candidate overall. It had nothing to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman, so I would want to vote for her. I just think I'm voting for the best candidate."

The competitive race sparked the second-highest voter turnout in history for a South Carolina primary - 530,000, just shy of the record set by Bush vs. McCain in 2000. More voters participated in the Democratic primary than the 446,000 who showed up for the Republican presidential contest a week earlier. It was the highest-ever Democratic turnout in the country's most reliably Republican state.

One behind-the-scenes factor firing up the huge turnout was Obama's impressive field S.C. organization, the best in the state among presidential contenders of either party. On primary day, Team Obama fielded an army of 9,000 volunteers, flushing out voters from 150 different staging sites across South Carolina. By comparison, Hillary Clinton's emergency ground operation in New Hampshire that helped pull her to victory numbered only 4,000.

Unfortunately for the Clintons, their plan to put Obama in a black box backfired. Not only did Obama win by a bi-racial landslide, but Bill Clinton's legacy as a uniter of black and white Americans is now at risk.

In his victory speech, Obama emphasized this election "is not about rich versus poor or young versus old, and it's not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future." A historic number of South Carolina voters seem to have agreed with him.

(Cross-posted from The Latest Outrage.)

1 | 2

http://www.thelatestoutrage.blogspot.com

Erik Ose is a writer and political activist living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His columns have appeared in NC newspapers such as The News & Observer and elsewhere including Salon.com and The Hill. He is a veteran of community organizing and (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.