Highlights of voting in Saturday’s Democratic primary in South Carolina.
Divided by race. Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, with 78 percent supporting him.
Nineteen percent of blacks voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton. While a quarter of whites voted for Obama, three-quarters of whites split their votes between the two white candidates, Clinton and John Edwards, voting 40 percent for Edwards and 36 percent for Clinton.
Edwards’ support came almost entirely from white voters.
Race over gender. Black women went overwhelmingly for the black man, in the same eight in 10 proportions as black men. Nearly all the rest voted for Clinton.
Clinton wasn’t even able to win a majority of white women, a group she split with 42 percent of the vote. Edwards won 36 percent of white women, while Obama won 22 percent of them. Edwards easily won among white men, getting 45 percent of their vote, compared with 28 percent for Clinton and 27 percent for Obama.
Ready for a first. Three in four voters said the country is ready to elect a black president, and about the same said the country is ready to elect a woman. Attack! After the contentious Democratic debate Monday night, 72 percent of Obama voters said Clinton had attacked Obama unfairly, and even 63 percent of Clinton voters said she had made unfair attacks. Most Clinton voters also said Obama had made unfair attacks against her, but just 44 percent of Obama supporters felt that way.
From a poll of 1,905 voters conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International as voters left 35 precincts. Margin of sampling error plus or minus 3 percentage points.
