Clinton Candidacy = Voter Suppression

I posted "Barack's Electoral Path to the Presidency" last week.

From The Politico:

Between flaps over bullets in Bosnia and bitterness in Pennsylvania, discussion of the Democratic nominating battle largely overlooks the real strategic difference in the race. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is steering her campaign by the same map Democrats have followed for 16 years, aiming to rally mostly large coastal and Midwestern states. Sen. Barack Obama thinks the map can be redrawn, swinging swaths of red states onto the blue side.

Clinton is struggling to hold the shrinking Eastern industrial states and aging working-class voters, holdovers from the old Democratic coalition. Obama’s new map reflects the appeal to rising social groups — Westerners, nonwhites and the well-educated — of his post-partisan call for unity and change. Their contest is more than a face-off of individuals; it is a confrontation between the Democratic Party’s past and future.

Read more here

This is why the Clinton "Big States Myth" is total B.S. because it doesn't take into account that Hillary can ONLY draw from the Democratic base and can't cross over. Also, it doesn't take into account HOW she gets the nomination. If she steals it with the superdelegates, there would be an angry backlash, particularly from the youth and African-American vote. These are folks who would say that they would vote for her now, but if it got ugly, they would turn away from Hillary Clinton.

Both of these groups are traditionally suppressed in terms of voting. I know from having canvassed black neighborhoods myself that it is HARD to get poor black folks to vote. You really have to work to get them to show up to the polls. They are suspicious. They feel that their vote doesn't count, or it will get changed, and they don't feel that any politician has their interests in mind.

The youth vote has traditionally been seen as "flaky" and that people put a lot of effort into organizing it, but it doesn't pay off on election day. They don't show up to the polls.

Barack Obama has excited both of these traditionally apathetic groups. Hillary stealing the nomination would put them back into a supressed state.