class

Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky drew attention to the salience of the white working class vote.

There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.