I Can't Be The Only One Who's Noticed

Here is the list of primaries and caucuses that Barack Obama has won. Next to each state's name is the percentage of that state's population that is black. Can you see a pattern?

State
Alabama (26.4)
Alaska (3.7)
Colorado (4.1)
Connecticut (10.1)
Delaware (20.7)
Georgia (29.8)
Hawaii (2.3)
Idaho (0.6)
Illinois (15.1)
Iowa (2.3)
Kansas (5.9)
Louisiana (33.1)
Maine (0.8)
Maryland (29.3)
Minnesota (4.3)
Mississippi (36.9)
Missouri (11.5)
Nebraska (4.3)
North Dakota (0.8)
South Carolina (29.2)
Utah (1.0)
Vermont (0.6)
Virginia (19.9)
Washington (3.5)
Washington DC (57.0)
Wisconsin (6.0)
Wyoming (0.9)

Still don't see it? Here's another clue. Blacks comprise 12.8% of the US population. Do you now see the pattern? Only 3 Obama states (Illinois, Missouri, and Connecticut) have a black population within 5 percentage points either way of the national average. All of the other Obama states are at least 20% black or less than 6% black. And one of the three aforementioned Obama states - Illinois - is his home state. If he had moved back to Kansas or Hawaii after finishing Harvard Law School, there is no reason to believe he would have done any better in Illinois than he did in Ohio (11.9% black).

It's really too bad the primaries in Florida and Michigan were not contested. Then we would have much more data on which to draw conclusions. But, we do know that Clinton won New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas (14.5% 11.9%, 16.8% and 11.7% black respectively) which are much closer to the national average. New York and Arkansas are both within the 5-point range I have discussed, but they are Clinton's home states so I am discounting them just as I have discounted Illinois for Obama.

What does this all mean? Why does Obama do best in states with very large numbers of blacks or almost no blacks at all? What, even more important, does this tell us about white Democrats?

It seems that the less likely white Democrats are to live near blacks, the more likely they are to vote for them.