Votes cast along racial fault lines, exit polls show
Candidates hold largely on to core support groups
WASHINGTON - Deep racial divisions emerged in yesterday's critical Democratic primaries, with African-American voters overwhelmingly supporting Senator Barack Obama and whites casting their votes solidly with Senator Hillary Clinton in both North Carolina and Indiana, according to exit polls.
Clinton captured 60 percent of the white vote in both states, according to surveys by CNN, suggesting a potential problem for Obama, should he continue on to win the nomination.
But the news was much worse for Clinton among black voters, a demographic group that favored her early in the primary season. She took an anemic 9 percent of the black vote in North Carolina and 8 percent of the African-American vote in Indiana .
The demographic divide kept Clinton competitive in overwhelmingly white Indiana, but destroyed her chances in North Carolina, where black voters comprised about a third of the electorate in the Democratic primary, according to CNN and ABC polls.
The two candidates, locked in a brutal battle for the Democratic nomination, largely held on to the voters that have kept each a contender in the race for 16 months. Clinton did well among white women and older voters, while Obama triumphed in both North Carolina and Indiana among first-time voters and young people.
But the racial split - a growing divide as the primary season winds down - was especially stark last night.
Most voters, black and white, said that race was not an important issue for them. But of those white voters in Indiana who did say that race mattered, 79 percent of them voted for Clinton. Her performance among African-Americans in both states was on par with those of conservative Republicans in general election campaigns.
It was not clear how the controversy surrounding Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary words on race and the US government - including allegations that the government might have developed AIDS to infect African-Americans - affected the outcome. In both states, about half of voters said the Wright controversy mattered to them, and those citizens were solidly in the Clinton camp. But those who said the Wright affair didn't matter went almost equally strongly for Obama.
Early exit polls showed that Clinton did well in rural areas in both states, suggesting that Bill Clinton's campaign through small-town America was effective. But those votes were easily erased in North Carolina, where voters in the cities and in some less-populated parts of the state chose Obama.
Gun owners favored Clinton in both states, although by a very small margin in North Carolina.
But despite her recent attempt to portray Obama as an "elitist," Clinton did not capture low-income voters in either state, according to the exit polls.
In North Carolina, Obama won among all income groups, and in Indiana, Obama captured 55 percent of voters making $15,000 or less a year. In other contests, Clinton has tended to do better among low-income and less-educated voters.
"I think this whole issue of elitism was sort of settled" with yesterday's contests, said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a liberal think tank formerly known as the New Democrat Network. With TV ads and campaign speeches aimed at economically suffering voters, "the Obama campaign made the struggle of everyday people a priority in those states more than they have in any other preceding state," said Rosenberg, who has not endorsed a candidate.
Clinton appeared to reach Indiana voters with her populist message; those who said the recession has affected them "a great deal" voted for her, polls said. But her campaign - including a much-derided promise to lift the 18.5-cent federal tax on gasoline for the summer - did not resonate as well in North Carolina, where a strong majority of voters who said the economy was a top issue voted for Obama.
