Regardless of what happens concerning Florida’s delegation to the Democratic convention, Florida is likely to be a key swing state in the general election. Florida ranks fourth among the states in electoral college votes, and Democrats have shown they are highly competitive there. To better understand Florida’s demographics Warren Bull’s BBC News article “Florida’s Hispanics weigh their vote” is a good place to begin. Bull notes:

About 20% of the Sunshine State’s population is Hispanic (rising to more than 60% in Miami Dade County) and it has long played an influential and sometimes decisive role in American politics…George W Bush would never have become the 43rd US president without the backing of more than half of Florida’s Latino voters.

Bull’s article also has a sidebar chart on Florida demographics with the following Census factoids:

Population: 18m
White, not Hispanic: 61.3%
Hispanic: 20.2%
Black: 15.8%
Home ownership rate: 70.1%
Median household income 2004: $40,900
US median: $44,334

Bull quotes Florida political analyst Dr. Paul Pozo on the diversity of Florida’s Hispanic community and its regional strongholds:

In the central part of Florida, the majority of the Latins are Puerto Rican. Some Central Americans are there also, and Mexicans in the north of Florida. South of Florida is basically the Cuban-American community.

Bull’s article doesn’t have the percentages for each Hispanic subgroup. But Adam C. Smith’s 2004 article in the St. Petersburg Times, “Parties court the ultimate swing vote: Florida’s Hispanics,” has a sidebar chart that indicates 31.1 percent of Florida Hispanics are Cuban, 18 percent Puerto Rican, 13.6 Mexican and 37.4 “other Hispanic and Latino.”
Adds Smith:

Hispanics account for about 12 percent of Florida’s electorate. The share made up of faithfully Republican Cuban-Americans has dropped from at least 80 percent a decade ago to 60 percent today. In 2000, Bush won 80 percent of the Cuban vote in Florida, while Gore won 60 percent of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote.

Victor Manuel Ramos notes in his Orlando Sentinel article, published by HispanicBusiness.com:

There are more than 1.1 million Hispanic voters statewide, including 207,000 in Central Florida. And they are the only major voter group that has grown — by 8,300 — since 2006. Statewide, a majority are Republicans.
By contrast, 42 percent of Central Florida’s Hispanics are registered Democrats, compared with 22 percent Republicans. That party alignment may explain why candidates haven’t invested much here.

Pozo has this to say about the ideologial breakdown:

The difference is in ideology. The Cuban-American community is more conservative and likes the Republican Party more than the Democrats. The Hispanic people in Central Florida are more inclined to the Democratic Party, and of course they feel different in so far as foreign relations.

Bull discusses the play of key issues of concern to Florida Hispanics, including: immigration; a high rate of foreclosures; health care reform; high drop-out rates; a depressed construction industry and the economy in general. Bull’s article links to a BBC demographic profile of Florida, which notes that seniors are 18 percent of the state population — the highest percentage in the nation.
Winning votes of Florida’s complex Hispanic demographic is a tricky challenge for Democrats. But with 27 electoral votes at stake, it’s not one Dems can afford to overlook.

Going into yesterday’s SC Democratic primary, the CW had firmed up to a remarkable degree: Obama would win on the foundation of a solid African-American vote, but would lose white voters so overwhelmingly that the victory would be not only narrow, but pyhrric, setting up a decisive loss for the “black candidate” to Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday. There was also talk that the racial dynamics of the contest might depress turnout.
Well, once gain, voters interrupted the CW, just as they did to Clinton’s benefit in NH. Obama won by a two-to-one margin, far above anything predicted in the polls, and while much of this performance was indeed attributable to a huge margin among African-Americans, he picked up one-fourth of the white vote as well. In an echo of his Iowa win, Obama actually won white voters under 30. As for turnout: SC Democrats not only smashed every past record, but exceeded the turnout among Republicans last week, which is pretty remarkable given SC’s status as perhaps the reddest of southern red states.
As the headline of an Alec MacGillis analysis of SC in the Washington Post aptly put it, Obama won by “A Margin That Will Be Hard To Marginalize.”
That’s not to say that SC eliminated the talk that Obama’s candidacy has become engulfed by a racial, ethnic and gender arithmetic that cuts against him down the road. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has done the best (so far) analysis of these factors in the early contests, and other than an unmistakable and massive swing towards Obama among African-American voters, the evidence is mixed. It’s hard to say that Obama can’t win white votes after finishing first and a close second in IA and NH, two places whose state songs could be “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” And it’s also worth noting that in SC, the kind of upscale, highly educated white voter demographics (other than young voters, whom we won) he carried in IA are in short supply, at least in the Democratic ranks. That won’t be the case in a lot of Super Tuesday states.
But it’s also unmistakably true that up until now, Clinton has had significant and in many cases overwhelming leads in the polls in a large majority of the Super Tuesday states, not to mention Florida on Tuesday. And she still leads in super-delegates by a two-to-one margin, despite some recent Obama gains.
The latest buzz is that Obama’s going to get some especially dramatic endorsements in the next few days. One is from yet another red-state moderate Democrat, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, one of the most widely praised young Democratic electeds in the country. Another is from the ultimate Old Lion of Liberalism, Ted Kennedy, whose niece, Caroline Kennedy, created some buzz of her own with a New York Times op-ed piece endorsing Obama as someone who could become “A President Like My Father.”
All in all, it’s as though voters are determined to make this election year as exciting and unpredictable as the college football season that just ended.

We lead with a quartet of posts with special relevance to SC today: First, for those who have been wondering about the SC poll numbers, Mark Blumenthal has “South Carolina: Why So Much Variation?” in his Pollster.com post
Adele M. Stan’s “Can Black Women Save the Liberal Coalition?” mulls over the new leverage African American women have in the primaries in The American Prospect. See also Amy Alexander’s post in The Nation, “Black Women Talk Barack” and Elizabeth G. Hines’s Alternet piece “What Black Women’s Votes Mean for the Presidential Race.”
The Clinton campaign is doing a lot of things right, chief among them is the way they have worked the Hispanic vote. The Politico’s Gebe Martinez “Clinton’s Hispanic Edge” may be the best article yet written about the Latino vote at this juncture in the ’08 campaign.
Time magazine’s Rani Molla probes the factors driving “The Democrats Turnout Triumph” in the primaries, and wonders if the pattern will hold in the general election.
Lest we forget, GOP front-runner John McCain has a messy track record, and The Daily Kos‘s Smintheus has the skinny in his article “McCain still lying after all these years.”

The national media have pretty clearly decided that John McCain is now the front runner in the GOP primary. With strong performances in New Hampshire and South Carolina, he has won two of the three traditional, nominee-deciding states. That fits a narrative that is easy for journalists to describe and analyze.
And it’s not just journalists projecting a McCain victory — Sen. John Edwards raised the specter of running against McCain in the last Democratic debate, and the McCain camp is reporting that they raised more than $7 million dollars in the month of January. To me, that looks like lots of Republicans are buying the hype as well.
But if you’re a McCain booster, there are some underlying issues that have to make you worry.
For starters, the nominating process is a race to win delegates, and McCain isn’t actually ahead. In fact, he’s well back in third place — the Arizona senator has 36 delegates, while Mike Huckabee is second with 40 and Mitt Romney leads the pack with 59.
At this point, Huckabee’s appeal is probably limited to his core group of evangelical supporters, and more importantly, he’s out money. He’s probably done. But Romney has been strong everywhere, winning contests in Michigan and Nevada, placing second in Iowa and New Hampshire (both of which added to his delegate totals). Earlier in the month, his campaign reported that they’d managed to raise $5 million, and of course, the multimillionaire can always give his campaign another infusion of cash.
As Ed has said before, there is a history of deep-seated distrust for John McCain among the GOP establishment. McCain has been a champion of campaign finance reform, outspoken critic of torture, and he acknowledged the threat of global warming when many said it was a myth. For whole lot of conservatives, no amount of stumping for Bush or speaking at Liberty University can make up for his earlier sins.
That conservative uncertainty has definitely played itself out so far in the election. After the New Hampshire Primary, former Sen. Rick Santorum was interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, and two questions in, he launched into criticism of McCain:

[O]n the economic side, he was against the President’s tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he’s absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs. I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened.

After South Carolina, when there was serious discussion about rallying around McCain as the most electable candidate in the GOP field, Rush Limbaugh launched into a diatribe:

We are supposedly damaging the conservative movement. We should just shut up. Just sit by and watch all this stuff and let it happen and just be quiet. What is the point? By the way, it’s aimed at people in talk radio. Why should we in talk radio “just shut up,” and start supporting the front-runner of the moment? Especially when you realize that’s what the Drive-By Media wants! Why should we in talk radio sit here and take our marching orders from the Drive-By Media and others in our movement who write what they write, for liberals in the Drive-By Media. Why should we do that. McCain, frankly, has shown conservatives little but contempt over many years.

At this point in the race, there is still deep opposition to McCain’s presidential campaign in the Republican Party, and it’s not just among opinion leaders, either.
John McCain has yet to win a majority of self-described conservatives. In New Hampshire, he lost them by 7 points to Mitt Romney; in Michigan, he lost 23 to 41, again to Romney; in South Carolina, it was 26 to 35, this time to Huckabee. McCain’s victories, when they’ve come, have been delivered by self-described moderates and Independents, and it’s no coincidence that both his wins have been in states with open primaries. He has also received a huge boost from the fractured state of the GOP field, but his success has served to drive his rivals out of the race.
For Republicans, the last test before Super Tuesday is Florida, and it’s a closed primary — if McCain is going to win, all of his supporters will have to be registered with the GOP. Immediately after South Carolina, polls there showed him ahead. Now, Romney has serious traction, and going into this weekend, it’s anyone’s guess who’s actually in the best position to win.
If McCain loses, his candidacy is in serious trouble. It will be an indication that he can’t compete without additional support from independents. And on Super Tuesday, that could spell disaster in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — where the primaries are all closed.
If McCain can’t solve his conservative problem, then the person with the most money and the best organization will become the GOP nominee, which will leave Democrats running against Mitt Romney in the fall. And like many conservatives, most Democrats would be happy with that contest.

E.J. Dionne today put his finger on an aspect of the Obama-Clinton rivalry that’s been percolating under the surface for a while. Noting the similarities between Obama’s frequent beyond-left-and-right talk–and more specifically, the tribute to Ronald Reagan’s leadership qualities that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been pounding him about–and the 1992 campaign message of one Bill Clinton, Dionne concludes:

In many ways, Obama is running the 2008 version of the 1992 Clinton campaign. You have the feeling that if Bill Clinton did not have another candidate in this contest, he’d be advising Obama and cheering him on.

E.J. might have added another parallel: Bill Clinton’s trump card in the 1992 nominating contest was his overwhelming support among African-Americans.
I’ve written before (as has Matt Compton) that Obama’s “Clintonian” trans-ideological and trans-partisan rhetoric has been a source of considerable ambivalence towards his candidacy by self-conscious Left Progressives in the party and the blogosphere (indeed, Armando Llorens of Talk Left today plays off Dionne’s column to blast Obama for an insufficiently partisan approach). But there’s a little-noticed flip side to this phenomenon. Despite the long association of the Clintons with the Centrist/DLC/”New Democrat” wing of the party, there’s pretty strong pro-Obama sentiment in centrist circles as well (something I first noticed at the DLC annual meeting last summer, where there was quite visible support for Obama among the several hundred state and local elected officials in attendance). Some observers were surprised by the raft of recent endorsements of Obama by red- and purple-state centrist elected officials in recent weeks (e.g., Janet Napolitano, Claire McCaskill, Jim Doyle, Tim Johnson, and Ben Nelson). Less attention has been paid to support for Obama in SC by long-time white centrist Democrats like former Gov. Jim Hodges, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, and former state party chair Dick Harpootlian.
In general, the early caucus and primary results have shown relatively little consistent correspondence between voter ideology and candidate preference; that’s a key reason that identity factors (age, race and gender) have played so obvious a role. So the “Clintonian” features of the Obama campaign aren’t just a small, ironic quirk. They are part and parcel of a contest where pinning down the candidates on a conventional left-right spectrum is exceedingly difficult.

The latest New York Times ‘Bloggingheads’ video features TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira and The Atlantic.com conservative blogger Ross Douthat discussing Democratic strategy regarding the “blowback on universal health care.”
Also at NYT, Kevin Sack takes an in-depth look at John Edwards’s health care proposal and probes his flexibility on on the issue. The Times also has a convenient gateway link to articles about all the presidential candidates’ health care plans. Yet another way to check out the candidates’ recent statements and positions on health care (and other issues) is through WaPo‘s nifty “issues tracker” tool, which flags relevant articles. Meanwhile, the just-released Pew Research Center report on issue priorities indicates health care reform is increasingly a leading concern of Independents.

In SC this week, John Edwards has continued his campaign’s complaint that he would be winning in that state and nationally if it weren’t for the news media’s obsession with his two rivals.
He’s obviously right that disproportionate media attention has been paid to Clinton and Obama, even prior to Iowa, though the historic nature of their candidacies was clearly a factor as much as any bias. Since Iowa, however, the focus on the two national front-runners has been completely natural, if somewhat self-reinforcing.
Moreover, the idea that Edwards’ only political handicap has been media negligence just doesn’t bear much scrutiny. He’s been running a relatively poor third in polls in his native state for many months, mainly because of his longstanding inability to attract much African-American support. And you can at least partially forgive the punditocracy for treating his loss in Iowa–his obsessive focus for years, building on a big head start in popularity and organization, and benefitting from an environment where national media coverage wasn’t that big a factor–as the crushing blow that Edwards supporters had long conceded it would be. Live by Iowa, die by Iowa.
The dispiriting Clinton-Obama slugfest in SC has given Edwards one last chance to significantly exceed low expectations–which he failed to do in NH and NV. If he succeeds, and the media continue to ignore him, then he probably has some right to complain.
But if Big Media probably shouldn’t be blamed for Edwards’ travails, I personally think they have played a major role in the “racialization” of the Clinton-Obama rivalry. It’s significant that all the race-talk began on the night of the NH primary, when the networks gave exceptional (and IMO, unmerited) credence to the “Bradley-Wilder Effect” of hidden voter racism as an explanation for Clinton’s upset win. I know some people blame the Clinton campaign for “racialization,” but it should be fairly obvious that if her campaign wanted to “go there,” it would have done so prior to the vote in the whiter-shade-of-pale states of IA and NH. Maybe the race-talk was inevitable in any contest including Obama, and maybe identity-based voting is higher than it otherwise would be in a competition where actual policy differences were visible to anyone other than the most serious wonks. But Big Media definitely let the race-genie out of the bottle, and it’s unclear when or whether it can be bottled back up.

One of the more interesting subplots in the Republican presidential contest is the attitude of conservative elites towards long-time intraparty nemesis John McCain. Most don’t like him, for a variety of reasons ranging from his sponsorship of campaign finance reform, to his wavering record on tax cuts, his past feuding with the Christian Right, and his habit of cosponsoring legislation with Democrats (most importantly, on immigration reform and global climate change). Sure, he’s flip-flopped at least partially on some of these issues, and has won some conservative brownie points with his championship of Iraq escalation and his frank support for a permanent U.S. military engagement in that country. But many conservatives opinion-leaders still don’t trust him at all, and their views appear to be shared by a significant number of conservative voters in the early primaries.
But results are results, and between McCain’s wins in NH and SC, and his uniquely strong showing in general election polls, conservatives are having to come to grips with a McCain nomination, particularly if he wins in FL.
In general, conservative elites are talking about McCain much as many of their Democratic counterparts talked about Howard Dean during the brief period in the last presidential cycle when his nomination looked “inevitable.” And just as some of those Democrats longed for reassurance from Dean that all his revolutionary rhetoric hid a conventional politician, conservatives are openly asking McCain for a pander or two to make them feel better about succumbing to his nomination.
Here’s an interesting opening bid by the L’Osservatore Romano of conservative opinion, National Review:

McCain will never win over all conservatives, even if he gets the nomination. But he can reassure conservatives if he pledges to name a conservative running mate and identifies respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges. He can promise to approach immigration reform piecemeal rather than comprehensively. He should say that strong evidence that the illegal-immigrant population is shrinking will have to arrive before he legalizes any large segment of that population. And he can acknowledge that scientific advances have weakened the case for federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.

Note the pointed reference to the veep choice, which should pour some cold water on neocon fantasies of a McCain-Lieberman ticket (no career-long supporters of abortion rights need apply), along with the demand for a flip-flop on stem cell research, and a full surrender on immigration reform.
At present, it’s unclear exactly how much leverage conservative elites have with McCain. He’s done pretty well without their support, and the real-world obstacle to McCain’s nomination is Mitt Romney’s bottomless campaign treasury, not conservative hostility. But expect to see more of this bidding for McCain’s allegiance if his electoral success continues.

Just an amen addendum to the conclusion of Ed’s article below that “Obama’s “ghetto” may be bigger than the pundits realize.” If any presidential candidate can be said to be appealing to the broadest possible demographic cross-section, it has to be Senator Obama. Conversely, I can’t think of any constituency he has pandered to as aggresively as, say Senator Clinton’s outreach to women voters of a certain age, or Edwards’ targeting of unions and blue collar workers.
Obama’s grand strategy seems to be casting the widest possible net, while his opponents are focused on snagging key demographics they see as critical for their respective campaigns. Sure, Obama wants the highest possible percentage of the African American vote. But if memory serves, he has been criticized by Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders for not being focused enough on the Black demographic. And yes, Obama is no doubt grateful for his huge edge with younger voters. But it’s not like he’s out there spending a lot more time on college campuses at the expense of other groups. He doesn’t have to spend a lot of time working young voters. They just like him. The young, white voters in my family talk about him like he is the hope of their generation.
I had to chuckle at the title and subtitle of Mickey Kaus’s Slate article flagged in Ed’s post: “How Obama Can Win: He can escape his electoral ghetto by playing the race-blind card.” Well, that train left the station some time ago, regardless of what happens in SC. Also the thought of any pundit giving Obama advice beyond maybe some really good ads targeting California Hispanics and seniors may be a smidge presumptuous. This guy was a state senator less than four years ago, and he’s got a good shot at becoming the leader of the free world by this time next year. There’s not a lot any journalists can teach him about taking advantage of political opportunity. Like him or not, Obama is running one hell of a smart campaign.

There is a new and (no matter whom you support) disturbing CW dominating analysis of the Democratic nominating contest at the moment. It’s that Obama is becoming the “black candidate,” repelling the white and brown voters who will determine the ultimate outcome. Indeed, this point of view is feeding the Clinton campaign’s efforts to downplay an expected Obama win in South Carolina this Saturday. After all (suggest the pundits, not the Clintons), SC is just about black folks, who won’t matter down the road. Typically, Dick Morris is the bluntest in publicly presenting this point of view, but I can tell you, it’s endemic in the DC chattering classes.
Totally aside from the corrosive effect of such race-based political assumptions–including the planted axiom that white and Latino voters don’t want to be on the same bandwagon as African-Americans–they strike me as a being over-simplistic from even a cold, amoral perspective. Here’s a new flash for the punditocracy: there are African-Americans who live in states other than South Carolina.
A case in point: the most under-discussed story about the Nevada Caucuses was that (according to the entrance polls) the African-American vote was a large as the Latino vote. Among the latter, it was widely reported that Clinton won by a little better than two-to-one. But among the former, Obama won by better than five-to-one. And lest we forget, Clinton was running even with or even ahead of Obama among African-Americans nationally until very recently.
In the February 5 states, African-American voters will almost certainly outnumber Latinos in a majority of states, will be crucial in quite a few (e.g., Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, New Jersey, Delaware, plus Obama’s own Illinois) and will be a significant factor in others, including California. If Obama’s margins among black voters match what he won in Nevada–not a bad bet, given the “racialization” of the campaign–then he can lose white and Latino voters substantially and still be competitive.
In other words, it’s not all that clear which candidate would ultimately benefit from a “racialization” of the nominating contest. And to use Mickey Kaus’ infelicitous term, Obama’s “ghetto” may be bigger than the pundits realize.