There are no demographic surprises in the Pennsylvania exit polls, but here are a few interesting points:

  • For all the hand-wringing over Obama’s “bitter cling” comments, he did well among voters who attend church more than once a week, and beat Clinton among Protestants. Where Clinton cleaned up was among the 36 percent of the electorate who were Catholic, winning 68 percent of their vote. Among the 7 percent of the electorate who were Jewish, she beat Obama by 10 points. As for guns, thirty-six percent of the Democratic voters owned them, and Clinton won 60 percent of their votes.
  • The shift of voters’ interest from Iraq to the economy is not favorable to Obama. The 55 percent of the electorate who ranked the economy as the most important issue favored Clinton 56-44. She also won among the 14 percent of health care voters. Obama, on the other hand, beat Clinton 56-44 among the 28 percent of voters who ranked Iraq as the nation’s number one concern.
  • No matter what economists say, 89 percent of Democratic primary voters believe we’re already in a recession.
  • Clinton won union households, 58 percent to Obama’s 42 percent.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.