Wisconsin and the White Working Class

via MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin - Salon has a piece by Mike Madden explaining the importance of Wisconsin's primary and probing why this perfectly composed demographic state for Hillary handed her a 17-point thrashing on Feb. 19.

Why did Obama do so well with Wisconsin's white working class, but not with Ohio and Pennsylvania's?

So well-received was Obama's victory here that many secular progressives were smitten with whimsical rumination of metaphysics. But Madden reasonably attributes the win to Wisconsin's progressive history.

Writes Madden:

... 'I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not [Obama] is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November," Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson reiterated on CBS's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday.

But that's not what Wolfson was saying back in February, when Obama clobbered Clinton by 17 points in Wisconsin, another state whose largely white, working-class demographics should have made it Clinton country. Census figures show the state is only 6 percent black, barely a quarter of residents have college degrees, and the median income hovers around the national average. But Obama won Wisconsin across the board, according to exit polls, taking almost every demographic group and subgroup. ...

... 'You could put the same demographics together and the same kind of community together, and I guarantee you that a liberal or African-American candidate will do about 5 to 10 points better' in Wisconsin than in other Rust Belt states, said (Paul Maslin, a neutral Democratic pollster based in Madison, Wisc., who helped run Howard Dean's 2004 campaign).

See also Wisconsin More Important than Pennsylvania Machine-State.