Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Politico:

On the night that Barack Obama clinched his party’s nomination, one-third of Hillary Clinton’s supporters in Montana and South Dakota said they would not vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Exit polls from both states demonstrate that Obama inherits a fractured coalition after the longest primary race in modern history. Demographic divisions dug by class, race, gender and political philosophy haunted Obama until his last contests, effectively forcing the Illinois senator to limp across the finish line Tuesday night.

The cappuccino versus coffee Democratic divide between upper class and working voters continued. Coffee Democrats were more likely to back Clinton while cappuccino Democrats were more likely to back Obama. That these divisions were also deepened by gender and racial identity — rooted in long-sought historic firsts for women and blacks — means that there exists an unprecedented intra-party burden that befalls Obama.

On Tuesday the more working-class white Democratic electorate of South Dakota once again proved un-winnable for Obama, as has been the case in contests from Ohio to Kentucky. By contrast, Obama won Montana, which was more upper class than South Dakota, and not nearly as liberal as in Oregon and Vermont, where Obama has fared best.

In Montana, Obama won six in 10 Democratic voters who had completed college but only won half of those without a college degree. In South Dakota, Clinton won six in 10 working class voters, while earning a slimmer majority of support from college-educated voters.

Four in 10 South Dakota voters were college educated, compared to half of Montanans.

Slightly more voters were liberal in Montana than South Dakota. Democratic voters in South Dakota were also about 10 percentage points more likely than in Montana to name the economy as their most important issue.

Roughly one quarter of Clinton voters in Montana said they would vote for McCain in November if Obama were the Democratic nominee; about one in 10 said they intended not to vote. When South Dakota Democratic voters were asked how they would vote if Obama was the Democratic nominee, about 15 percent of Clinton supporters said they would back McCain and an equal portion said they intended to sit out the general election.

It was white women in who largely handed Clinton her South Dakota victory as Clinton’s historic bid effectively came to a close.

Clinton won nearly six in 10 white women in South Dakota, mimicking her average throughout the primaries. She also split white men in the state. Montana was the mirror opposite, as Obama won more than six in ten white men and split white women. About nine in ten voters in both states were white.

Looking back, white men were the largest swing bloc throughout the Democratic primaries. White women and Hispanics near uniformly went for Clinton. Black voters uniformly voted for Obama. But white men only favored Clinton in a half dozen more states and by only a couple percentage points overall, while those older and less educated were more firmly in her camp.

It was with millions of whites support that Obama became the first black candidate to win the nomination of a major party. Nevertheless, small but continued minorities of whites admitted that race was a factor in their support for Clinton, as one in ten said in South Dakota.

Obama won the nomination by winning some of the whitest states in the union, from Iowa at the outset of the race to the final night in Montana. However, the asterisk beside that feat now follows Obama to the general election. Obama never was able to make sustainable inroads with working-class, female, and older whites.