×
I'm not much of an electoral number-cruncher, but Josh Marshall's analysis of Barack Obama's "Appalachia problem"is fascinating:
There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama's problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama's problem isn't with white working class voters or rural voters. It's Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he's getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.In so many words, Pennsylvania and Ohio have big chunks of Appalachia within their borders. But those regions are heavily offset by non-Appalachian sections that are cultural and demographically distinct. West Virginia is 100% Appalachian. If you look at southeastern Ohio or the middle chunk of Pennsylvania, Obama did about the same as he's doing tonight in West Virginia.Josh offers some hypotheses on why this might be so, ranging from demographics (Appalachia is white, poor, uneducated, and old -- a perfect storm of demographics that bode badly for Obama) to settlement patterns to history. I don't pretend to know the answer here, but it's worth thinking through. Obama's major problem, after all, has not been with white voters in Wisconsin or Arizona or Kansas. It's been a very distinct struggle with a very distinct demographic.(Via Chris.)
