Election Center 2008: Primary Exit Polls - Elections & Politics news from CNN.com

Election Center 2008: South Carolina Democratic Primary Exit Polls

Obama took 2/3 of the votes from people under 45. The only age group Hillary won was 65+.

The decisive factor in the primary, however, is disguised by the way CNN laid out the data. It was race, plain and simple.

• Obama won the black vote 79-19-2. (Edwards is no factor with black voters.)
• But John Edwards (gasp!!) won the non-black vote in a tight battle with Hillary, and Obama finished a poor third, 39-37-24.
• The results are thus not as favorable for Obama as one might think from a superficial reading. Nationwide, black voters represent less than a quarter of registered Democrats. Their impact is even less in a national election. Black voters represented only 11% of voters in the 2004 election, and they will vote 90% Democratic no matter who the nominees are.
• HOWEVER - Obama's claim to electoral strength is that his presence in a general election (or even in a primary) can spur black people to register and vote in record numbers. There is some truth to that. In the 2004 South Carolina Democratic primary, only 47% of the voters were African-Americans. In the 2008 election, that percentage had risen to 54%. That statistic is far more impressive when viewed in terms of raw numbers. Approximately 135,000 black voters cast ballots in the 2004 South Carolina primary. That number MORE THAN DOUBLED in 2008 to 290,000. That's a lot of votes. (In fairness, the number of non-black voters also increased substantially, from 145,000 to 240,000.) If Obama can generate enthusiasm like that in a national election, he will still get the usual 90-95% of black voters that Democrats always get, but it will be 95% of a much larger number. (Well, it's not always above 90%. Only 88% for John Kerry. That takes into account the douchebag factor.)