“It was a 100 percent Hispanic primary and it shows that he has a problem with the Latino community,” Terry McAuliffe, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton, told a handful of reporters after polls closed Sunday. “He cannot close in this key core constituency,” McAuliffe added.
Voters in Puerto Rico are in some ways different from Hispanics living stateside, both because there’s a long tradition of racial mixing and because elections here tend to center around the debate over whether the island should remain a commonwealth or become a state or an independent nation. They also don't vote in November.
Clinton has fared better than Obama with Hispanic voters in previous primaries. And her campaign has argued to superdelegates that she’d do better than Obama against presumptive GOP nominee in key states with large Hispanic populations.
CNN exit polls in Puerto Rico found a surprisingly high 31 percent of voters admitted the race of the candidates was important in their decision. Of those, 63 percent voted for Clinton and 37 percent for Obama.
“It helps make the case that we would not have to expend resources to win a natural Democratic constituency,” said Puerto Rico Senate president Kenneth D. McClintock, a Clinton co-chair and superdelegate. If Obama is the nominee, McClintock asserted that in order to win the Hispanic vote, Democrats “would have to divert resources that we would otherwise spend on other campaigns.”
But McAuliffe’s assertion Sunday that Obama has a Hispanic “problem” was more direct than any the campaign has made publicly to date.
Look, Terry, there are better ways to say that Barack Obama has a problem with Hispanic voters....like saying that Barack Obama has a problem with Hispanic voters!
This freudian slip is just one of many factors that have led the Clinton campaign to ruin, or more notably, the many fredian slips that have been made this primary season, including the RFK debacle, the "...working, hard-working Americans, white Americans..." comments, the Gereldine Ferraro remarks, etc.
1 comment:
This whole "cannot close" meme is pretty ridiculous. Because one Democratic candidate resonates more (or less) than another with any given segment of the electorate in a primary has very little bearing on whether or not that candidate could win that segment when running in opposition to the Republican candidate in the general election.
You can prefer tangerines to oranges, but if the other choice is a banana and you're a diehard citrus fan, you'll go for the orange.
Let's get on to the general and put all this slicing and dicing of demographics behind us, already! Truth is that this is poised to be a very strong year for Democrats across the board. Let's not screw it up and hand it to "Get off my yard you hooligans" McCain.
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