AmericasBlood.com

Barack Obama did well with Democrats across both race and gender lines Tuesday night, and seems to be eating away at Hillary Clinton’s backbone of support: women.

According to exit polls out of both Virginia and Maryland, in both states Obama won roughly 60 percent of the female vote — a demographic that has carried Clinton to success in past primaries.

Clinton even fared worse among men – more than two-thirds in both states chose Obama.

Meanwhile, the Illinois senator scored his highest percentage of African-American support to date — winning close to 90 percent of that voting bloc in each state. And the two evenly split the white vote in Virginia, while Clinton slightly beat Obama among the white vote in Maryland. In most past primaries, Clinton has held an edge among white voters.

Obama even beat Clinton among Latino voters, a group that his heavily favored Clinton in most past primaries. In Virginia and Maryland, Latinos went for Obama over Clinton by 6 points, though their support was not decisive in either contest – only 5 percent of Democratic primary voters in Virginia, and 4 percent in Maryland, were Latino.

The only demographic Clinton won was white women, who broke for her over Obama by 10 points in Virginia and 13 points in Maryland. But that margin is significantly smaller than the national average on Super Tuesday. She beat Obama among white women by 25 points then, according to national exit polls.

 

For the second election night in a row, Hillary Clinton failed to acknowledge or congratulate Barack Obama after he won the day in dominating fashion.

On Tuesday in El Paso, hours after Virginia had been called for Obama, she stuck to her “Texas campaign kickoff” message and did not stray from an energetic, Lone Star-themed stump speech. She did mention Obama by name, only to chide his health care plan.

On Saturday night in Richmond, Virginia, Clinton spoke to a crowd of thousands at the state’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, but she ignored Obama’s quartet of blowout primary and caucus wins that day as well (Obama also won the Maine caucuses the next day).

The courtesy of conceding a primary or caucus loss — and then congratulating your opponent — is by no means required. But it has become standard practice during campaign season.

Clinton congratulated Obama and John Edwards after their first and second place finishes in the Iowa caucuses. Obama returned the favor in New Hampshire, saying Clinton “did an outstanding job.” That courtesy continued through the early states.

But as the race has shifted to a delegate chase with dozens of states in play around the country, the notion of congratulating one’s opponent seems, for Clinton, to have fallen by the wayside.