2008 West Virginia Democratic Primary Results Map

In the Mountaineer state, Hillary Clinton followed the brilliant strategy of winning everywhere. Obama did a hair better in the Northern and Eastern reaches of the state. The lightest counties, outside of the three in the Eastern tip, are Monongalia (Morgantown/WVU), Ohio (Wheeling), and Kanawha (Charleston). He fared worse in the Southwestern part of the state, drawing single digits in a few counties, which is bad news for the upcoming contest in Kentucky.

Comments

[Joe]

My guess is he does much better in Kentucky (though he'll still lose by more than 20 points). It has a big(gish) city, a decent-sized college town, some affluent suburbs (of Cincinatti), and the western part of the state is more downstate Illinois/Indiana/Missouri than Appalachia (which he still loses, but not by 90-10). Combine those friendly areas with the fact that Kentucky is much more affluent than WV and healthy dollop of "this thing is over", and I'm hoping 61-39 or so.

The real question is whether Obama can win Oregon big enough so that the two states are a wash. Given that most of the Oregon voting has already happened, it's possible that the vote total will be a little elevated. Using Kerry's vote total in the general election as a rough estimate and adjusting Kentucky slightly downwards for the above reason, we can expect maybe 950,000 voters in Oregon and 700,000 voters in Kentucky. Let's say he wins Oregon 57-43 and she wins Kentucky 61-39. That results in... a net pickup for her of about 19,000 votes. Even under generous estimates, she picks up less than 50,000 total votes next Tuesday.

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

It's also about 7.5% African-American, which will help too. But considering the final tally gave him only 26%, which is about where he was polling, I can't see him getting more than 35% in the bluegrass state. The people who voted for edwards in West Virginia will probably either not vote or vote for Clinton.

[ikl]

If you look at the TN map, that was pretty bad too. It is not just Appalachia - it is really most white parts of the interior upper south. So Western KY and Southern KY should be better than the Southeast, but not that much better . . . all of the 5 delegate districts could split 4-1 for Clinton.

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

hmm ... I guess the term should be "Greater Appalachia" -- not just the Mountain regions themselves, but their foothills in north GA, MS, AL, east TN, etc.

It's unclear to me how Western Kentucky will vote. Southeastern MO went pretty heavily for Clinton, so that's probably a bad sign.

[John]

Obama ought to do well in Louisville, Lexington, and the Cincinnati suburbs, at least, and with black voters, who are much more prevalent in Kentucky than in West Virginia.

He won't do well in western and central Kentucky, but he won't do as badly as he did in West Virginia. about 25 points wouldn't be too surprising - certainly nowhere near 40 points.

Obama's campaigned a lot more in Kentucky than he did in Tennessee, but on the other hand, Tennessee was a lot more demographically favorable than Kentucky (much larger black population, although this advantage was somewhat dimmed by the fact that there were serious tornadoes in Memphis on election day that kept turnout in the most Obama friendly part of the state way down). I'd not be surprised if Obama's performance in Kentucky looks more like his performance in Tennessee than his performance in West Virginia.