Stop the Hoosier State Spinsanity; Obama Had It, and Lost It (Rush Update; Indiana Analysis Update)

Read this:

Here’s what the middle para above means: Polls, schmolls — Obama had the Hoosier State in the bag until the Wright mess came along, and he let it get away.

If it weren’t for Wright, Obama wins Indiana, and the contest would be over.

Spin that.

Further elaboration on the NC-IN results is at Newsbusters.org.

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UPDATE, 1 p.m.: Rush is on today saying that the Obama campaign has said three separate times in the past 18 hours that Hillary would not have won Indiana if it were not for Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos campaign to get Republicans to register as Democrats and vote for her. If so, it’s the Obama-Wright decay that made it close enough for Operation Chaos to have a chance to succeed.

UPDATE 2, 1:30 p.m.: Well. Be careful what you “assume.” My estimate of Obama’s performance with non-African Americans in Indiana is that he did more dismally than I would have thought:

(This chart was updated with a different African-American vote percentage and slightly different vote totals at this later BizzyBlog post.)

Given the next-door-neighbor effect, getting barely 40% of the non-black vote is pitiful.

As before, the vote numbers are from this ABC link. The estimate of black voter turnout is based on a black Hoosier State population percentage of 9.4%, then assuming that its turnout multiple was the same as North Carolina’s estimate (40% turnout divided by 22.3% of the population):

40% divided by 22.3% = 1.79
1.79 times 9.4% = 16.8%

As with North Carolina, the result supports the notion that Mrs. Clinton would outperform Obama in the general election.

UPDATE 3, 2 p.m.: Now here’s an interesting point. What percentage of the African-American vote did Obama win in South Carolina? Surprise: “Only” 80%.

It’s going to be really easy, and really wrong, for Old Media to try to claim that the above-90% black support of Obama is a Rev. Wright backlash. The fact is that Obama got 86% of the black vote in Ohio, where the governor, who is somewhat popular with blacks, was and still is a Hillary superdelegate. He won 85% of the black vote in Texas. Both primaries took place nine days before the Wright story broke nationally.

It’s much more likely that the extraordinarily high black vote in NC and IN was part of an ongoing reaction to Bill Clinton’s “subtle” race-card playing that began after South Carolina. Ohio and Texas were just short of the halfway marks of that trend, which has never truly ended. Obama’s African-American pickups have had little if anything to do with Wright.