Election Night: Obama wins Mississippi, Carson holds IN-07 for Dems

As expected, Barack Obama won the Mississippi primary. Exit polls indicate that Clinton could have crossed 40%, and while we will have to wait for the final results to know the delegate spread there is a possibility that she can cut her losses since she kept it close in the state's white regions, while Obama ran up the margins in the predominantly black areas.

The vote was as racially polarized as we have seen all year: Obama got 92% of the black vote (to Clinton's 8%), and Clinton 70% of the white vote (to Obama's 26%) -- that's a 128% racial gap. That also means that Clinton's margin of defeat was probably as good as Clinton could have hoped for. She has not gotten that much higher among the African-American vote throughout the primaries, but she has never ended up with this big a share of the white vote.

More confirmation of how the two electoral coalitions differ: The third of the electorate that has a good impression of McCain votes overwhelmingly for Clinton, the two thirds that have an unfavorable one go overwhelmingly for Obama. And 3/4th of Clinton backers in Mississippi said they would be dissatisfied if Obama was the nominee, a much higher proportion than what we are used to seeing. Clearly, Mississippi's conservative (white) Democrats do not trust Obama and do not want to see him as the nominee, most evidently because of racial factors.

Meanwhile, the special election in IN-07 has not been called yet -- and with 42% of the vote it is very tight. Carson is leading 50% to 47%, which is only about 700 votes. It's not possible to know how many of the ballots come from Indianapolis since all the results are from Marion County; late ballots tend to be more urban so that should favor Carson as more ballots are counted. Needless to say that if Elrod were to win that would be a huge relief for the NRCC a few days after their loss in IL-14, and merely keeping it close will allow them to argue that special elections are unpredictable and that no trend should be read in Foster's victory. For a background of this race, check here.

Update: Carson did increase his lead as all ballots got counted. He won 54% to 43%, a 9,000 vote margin. And he therefore holds the seat for Democrats, some of which were slightly worried about what might happen here. This makes Carson the second Muslim representative ever elected to Congress.

In Mississippi, Obama won 61% to 37%, so Clinton failed to cross the arbitrary 40% threshold I had proposed for her. But as I predicted after seeing exit polls, Clinton managed to cut her losses among delegates, a rare case in which it is her rival and not her that is hurt by the delegate attribution rules. Because Obama failed to cross the 62.5% threshold he splits the statewide delegates 6-5. Overall, Clinton kept it close in the state's white regions (she won the 1st congressional district), so Obama ends up with a 5 delegate lead: 19-14.