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While Clinton won early voting in Arizona -- which took place around the time of voting in the Deep South -- by a 25.4 percent margin, Election Day and provisional ballots in the heavily Latino state (which all came in as Sanders was decimating Clinton's lead among nonwhite voters in mid-March) favored Sanders 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent (82,470 votes for Sanders, 77,849 for Clinton). Given that Arizona has the sixth-largest Latino population of any American state, it's exceedingly difficult to imagine Sanders beating Clinton in non-early voting there by nearly 3 points without performing exponentially better among Latinos than he had at the beginning of the month (e.g., his 42-point loss among Latinos in Texas on March 1st, which contributed substantially to his 32-point loss in the state).
It's worth noting, too, that Arizona still has thousands of predominantly Sanders-voter provisional ballots to count, so the Senator's 3-point margin in Election Day and provisional voting there is almost certain to widen. And the counties now giving him the largest additional margin in provisional voting are counties with sizable populations of Latino voters.
In short, there simply is no evidence available to suggest that Hillary Clinton's robust coalition of nonwhite voters still exists -- certainly not in anything like the form it was just four weeks ago. How else to explain an 82-point margin among nonwhite voters in Alabama, and similar margins in every other Southern state, on March 1st, and just a 6-point lead among all Southern Democrats (who are, depending upon the state, between 27 percent and 71 percent African-American) on March 26th?
Indeed, even where Clinton now outperforms Sanders among nonwhite voters, the margin -- when and as there is one -- is perfectly in keeping with competitive politics in the contemporary era. And it is dwarfed, as it happens, by Sanders' lead among other key groups, notably voters under 30 (particularly Latino voters under 30) and independent voters.
The Clinton-Sanders tilt remains at a stage in which nearly all the real-time data favors Sanders, and all the television and print coverage favors Clinton because of a delegate lead she built up during Deep-South voting a month ago. The race as it is being reported therefore bears no relation to the race as it is, which is why the Clinton camp has all but pulled out of Wisconsin -- anticipating a sizable loss there that will emphasize the momentum (actual and internals-supported) Sanders developed in Mountain-state and Western voting over the past two weeks.
Consider: in North Carolina two weeks ago, Sanders handily defeated Clinton among white voters (+9) and narrowly lost among all voters on Election Day (-4). However, the Senator's performance (-61) among African-American voters -- many of whom voted early, well before March 15th -- doomed him to lose the state as a whole by 13.8 percent.
If Sanders had had the African-American support during early voting (and some Election Day voting) in North Carolina that he enjoys today, he would have lost all voting in North Carolina by fewer than four and a half points -- 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent (514,447 for Clinton, 460,828 for Sanders). But here's the key: in a Midwestern or Northeastern state, rather than a Southern one -- indeed, in any state with racial and ethnic demographics in the middle 50 percent of American states -- those same internals would result in a massive Sanders win.
Which, as it happens, is what the State of Wisconsin may well be for Sanders in just five days.
In other words, hold onto your hats, folks.
Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University) and the author, most recently, of DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
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