Obama v. Clinton: all about Benjamins

by Jim Tankersley

We're not just politics nerds here at The Swamp - we're also stats nerds. So when the two intersect in an interesting, readable way, we're happy campers. That's the case today, with a detailed anaylsis by RealClearPolitics blogger Jay Cost of Barack Obama's "coalition" of voter support.

Cost mines exit poll data and detailed voting results to break down Obama and opponent Hillary Clinton's support by region and demographics. Then he uses regression analysis - a mathematical tool for finding meaningful correlations in sets of data - to show the underlying trend of which candidate wins which voters.

Bottom line: White Democratic voters split consistently along socioeconomic lines. The richer and more educated they are, the better Obama does. That holds true, to varying degrees, among men and women and across generations. As Cost puts it, "among white voters, socioeconomic status permeates the Obama v. Clinton contest. It seems that one's inclination to vote for a candidate does not depend simply upon age and gender, but age and gender in the context of socioeconomic status. These factors interact with one another to produce (ultimately) a vote choice."

Cost also concludes that higher-income, better-educated whites - along with African Americans, who support him across socioeconomic lines - represent a more fundamental "base" for Obama east of the Mississippi than West of it.

"In a sense," Cost writes, "he has been like two different candidates. In the west, his candidacy has been broadly based and relatively diverse (though he has lagged behind with Hispanics). In the east, it has been more narrow, largely failing to build a real cross-section of the electorate, at least outside New England."

We invite you to channel your inner nerd and read the full analysis here. Scroll down to read Part 1 first. Tomorrow, Cost promises to tell us what this all means for battleground states.