a sad day for the Democratic party

Normally I try to come up with some witty title for my posts. Today, I am in no such mood. I have received several phone calls asking about my thoughts on yesterday's primaries and caucuses and I have many thoughts. This blog is meant as a forum for discussion so please post comments if anything I say you agree, disagree, or find interesting.

Why did Hillary Clinton win Texas and Ohio yesterday? I have been pouring over exit polls, newspaper columnists, MSNBC, and other sources hoping desperately to find out what happened. If I may have a few minutes of your time, I may have something here...

1. Hillary Clinton continues her amazing run with the Latino vote. I have never quite understood this because on social issues, she and Obama have very similar, liberal, views. However, both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have quite liberal views on immigration while Obama leans moderate. Yesterday, in Texas and Ohio, Hispanic voters voted for Clinton by a 2 - 1 majority. In politics, to win any group 67% - 33% is downright amazing!

2. Obama continues to do well with young people (or those voters 30 or younger.) He took 61% of their vote last night. However, only 16% of the voters yesterday were 30 or younger. While, 67% of the voters yesterday were 50 years old or older. Of that group, 64% voted for Hillary. As much as I hate to admit it, young people are just not a very active voting block. They don't donate very much money and they rarely come out to vote. Candidates who have relied heavily on the youth vote tend to crash and crash hard.

3. The most interesting exit poll result I found was when asked in exit polls, if you decided on a candidate in the past three days, between Obama and Clinton, Clinton had 64% and Obama had 36%. Unfortunately, this has not happened because Clinton's popularity has soared. After attacks from Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, Obama's approval rating is dipping more and more every day. This could not be a better scenario for McCain. While he is being Mr. Positivity and going to fund raiser after fund raiser, he is letting Obama and Clinton go after each other so that once one of the two is nominated, they will be badly bruised, broke, and with their approval ratings lower then Bush's.

4. What are we going to do about Michigan and Florida? The national Democratic Party is punishing those states for moving their primaries up too early and they have been stripped of all their delegates. However, with the race being this close, this has really angered Democrats and Independents in those two states. This does not mean that they will all of sudden become huge McCain supporters, but what it means is they are not going to donate any money to the Democrats.

5. The X factor in all of this is how many Republicans voted for Hillary. I know for a fact that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and other prominent conservative leaders know darn well that a prolonged Democratic race is good for McCain so they asked their supporters to all go out and vote for Hillary. We will never know how much of an X factor this actually was but I have to think it was something.