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In Nevada, Women Again Come Through for Clinton

On the Saturday before Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went at each other at the beginning of the debate on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Clinton nailed a significant victory in the Nevada caucuses with a powerful ground campaign that brought tens of thousands of new voters to the table. She won women by a 13-point margin and took an astounding 64 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Hispanics are a major force in Nevada, an even larger one in key states holding primaries in the next month, such as California. They comprise 15 percent of Nevada’s eligible voters, even more in some Western states.

In Nevada, they also are a force in unions. They make up 49 percent of the state’s most potent union, the Culinary Workers Union, part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The parent union ultimately endorsed Barack Obama, 10 days before the Saturday caucuses. By that time, the Clinton campaign already had made major inroads with the rank and file, especially Hispanic women.

One flier from the Clinton camp played a part in their game plan: a parody of sorts of the many hair styles worn by Hillary during decades in public life, most of them dissected by the national media. It was far more than a funny flier, however. On another level, the flier could be seen as encouraging women to make up their own minds, to not let “the establishment” control their image, their views—or their votes.

That worked.

As in the lead up to the New Hampshire primary, sexism never was an overt issue in the Nevada campaign. It probably didn’t hurt that a day before the vote, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews apologized for what he said “some took” as condescending or demeaning remarks about Clinton. Women’s rights groups—including the Women’s Media Center—had begun circulating petitions of protest to NBC.

It will take more research to see if voters noticed the slights by Matthews.

But the world could watch the caucuses and watch many rank-and-file union members, especially Hispanics, insist on making their own choice for president, bucking the bosses and the union-anointed candidate.

The Nevada entry polls also showed that:

  • Clinton had a 24-point margin with white women and also won votes of white men, 46 to 40 percent.
  • Obama took the youth vote but there were fewer young voters than in previous states.
  • Once again, Clinton won votes of the over-45 participants but, this time, it was by a 2-1 margin. Among the 60-plus voters, she got 60 percent to Obama’s 31 percent—and this bloc is more than a third of the Nevada electorate.
  • Although Obama took only 26 percent of the Hispanic vote, he won a commanding lead among black voters, 83 percent to 14 percent for Clinton.

Nevada offered the first proof that Hispanics see Hillary as a known quantity. Exit polls showed that voters favored “experience” more than change, in most demographic groups. They also fear bad economic times ahead. Nevada is the fastest growing state in the country—but mortgage foreclosures also are at record highs, with Hispanic homeowners especially hard hit.

Analysts predicted that this ethnic and racial divide would play out in significant ways in the two dozen upcoming primaries in the next month. Obama is seen favored to win South Carolina where blacks comprise half the Democratic base. If the Hispanic vote continues to break for Clinton, that could be significant in states such as California, Arizona and Texas where there are large Hispanics populations. As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Nevada had a record turnout of Democrats—12 times higher than any previous caucuses. This, despite election-eve accusations by both sides that there were competing attempts to depress the caucus vote.

The Las Vegas Sun reported that the Clinton campaign made strategic decisions in mid-December to try and quadruple the pool of caucus participants, after the state director Robby Mook sensed that voters were tuning into the unfolding Democratic primary drama. He told his 600 volunteers to quadruple their efforts. Last August, the goal had been to recruit about 25,000 caucus supporters but in a December 15 meeting with volunteers, he raised the target to 60,000. This was before the shockwaves in Iowa, when Obama won the caucuses with an unprecedented turnout of new participants.

The Clinton forces met their goals in Nevada, with one volunteer in charge of 10 caucus participants—to meet with them, to prep them on how a caucus works, to shore up their support.

In the 10 days before the Nevada caucuses, Hillary and Bill Clinton began their own on-the-ground persuasion. Hillary talked substance, including the formidable housing foreclosures and her plan to deal with it. The president smoozed with voters—and, not incidentally, spent hours behind the scene with workers in the casinos and the casino hotels.

Clinton took seven of the nine caucuses held in casinos, for the tens of thousands of casino workers.

After the Nevada vote, Obama has talked with some heat about being “double-teamed” by the Clintons. One of his campaign chiefs said the former president and his wife, the current presidential candidate, were playing good cop/bad cop roles in the campaign. He said he was going to start challenging the former president, especially, on what he saw as untruths or half-truths.

In the Democratic debate Monday night, Obama said that sometimes it was hard to know which Clinton he was running against. He also said he was troubled “at how my record is not being accurately portrayed.” And then he added a pitch for his candidacy, of “how important it is to redraw the political map in this country.…We can’t just take the [existing] playing field as a given.”

Each of the candidates may have had their best moments during the debate when telling voters why she or he would be the best candidate against the Republicans. John Edwards predicted that John McCain would win the GOP contest and argued that he would best be able to beat him, particularly since McCain, champion of campaign finance reform, couldn’t accuse him of accepting campaign money from special interests. Obama, following his comment about altering the political map, argued that he was the best candidate of the three to bring in independent voters and disaffected Republicans. Clinton emphasized how rough the campaign would be during the general election and argued that she was the best able to stand up under and withstand the GOP attack. She said she had been doing it for years.



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