Hispanic voters, Mr. Camarillo said, “might not go into the direction of the Obama camp.”
Hispanics made up 12 percent (roughly 300,000) of the eligible voters in NV and Hillary won more than two-thirds of those votes, including many of the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union rank-and-file - 45 percent of whom are Hispanic – who defied their union leadership and voted for Hillary instead of Obama.
In all, Hilllary got 51 percent of the vote, to Obama’s 45 percent. Edwards finished below 5 percent, which knocks him out of serious contention. While Hillary won half the votes of whites and women, Obama got 83 percent of the black vote (Hillary got 14 percent). Clearly, the Hispanic vote made the difference for Hillary.
On the Republican side, the only surprise in the race is that Ron Paul came in second, with 14 percent of the vote to Romney’s 51 percent). Romney’s rivals had ceded NV to him, in part because NV has the 4th largest population of Mormons by percentage (after UT, ID and WY), and nearly all of them (95 percent) gave their votes to Romney.
In SC, McCain edged Huckabee out by three points (33 percent to 30 percent). Huckabee no doubt wishes he had been able to get the evangelicals in SC to vote for him in a monolithic bloc as they did for Romney in NV - which would have given him more wiggle room to do without the 16 percent of the conservative and Republican vote that Thompson siphoned off.
Huckabee’s campaign is convinced that that their man would have otherwise beaten McCain. Jim Pinkerton, a senior advisor to the Huckabee campaign, tells The Stiletto via e-mail: “There's no question that Thompson was the spoiler for us. You can do the math and see that we would have won otherwise.”
But The Stiletto isn’t sure the math adds up. More than half the state’s voters are evangelicals, and Huckabee had only a 13 point advantage over McCain amongst these voters (40 percent vs. 27 percent); in NH he split the evangelical vote with McCain and Romney. Perhaps when Thompson drops out of the race, Huckabee will be able to rack up a high enough percentage of evangelical and values vote to be competitive in the five Southern states holding a primary or caucus on Super Duper Tuesday.
The races on both sides are like half-cooled Jell-O – still fluid, but slowly starting to set.
Hillary’s in a stronger position going into FL than Obama, even if he wins in SC next week on the strength of black support. Different state, different race: One out of five voters are Hispanic, and they’re pretty evenly divided between the Democrat and Republican parties. Hillary will win the state (as well as CA, NY and NJ on February 5th) if she repeats the success she had in NV amongst Hispanics.
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