The Georgia results seem to show two things: 1) Almost all the John Edwards vote, which was primarily white, went to Barack Obama, 2) Obama slightly increased his already large margin among black voters over the last weeks. If you look at the Mason-Dixon poll from early January, Obama had 36 percent of the overall Georgia vote, Clinton 33 percent, and Edwards 14 percent, with 17 percent undecided. Blacks often say they are undecided, so it is probably a fair guess to say that more than half of these undecided voters were African Americans. According to the exit polls now (which are revised later), Obama will defeat Clinton by 60 to 34 percent. In other words, Clinton failed to increase her vote from early January. That may bode ill for her in other non-Southern states.
John B. Judis is the author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism and Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, the forthcoming Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
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