Michael Barone

A big news day.

• Barack Obama won yesterday's Mississippi primary.  The exit poll shows an electorate more racially polarized than any we have seen this year, with more than 90 percent of black voters backing Obama and more than 72 percent of whites backing Hillary Clinton. This should be no surprise. In presidential general elections, Mississippi has been the most racially polarized state in the nation.

• New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has announced his resignation.

• Adm. William Fallon has announced he is resigning as head of Central Command. An article by Thomas P. M. Barnett in Esquire, released last week, depicts Fallon as singlehandedly preventing George W. Bush from taking military action against Iran. This sounds very much like insubordination. Max Boot has an interesting take. I may write about this in my Creators Syndicate column for next week. We have seen individuals in the State Department and the intelligence community work to undermine administration policy, but it's quite another thing for a career military officer to do so. Most members of the military believe strongly in the principle of civilian control; Admiral Fallon seems to have taken a different view.

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Democrat Bill Foster beat Republican Jim Oberweis in the special election to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. This is a district George W. Bush carried 54 to 42 percent in 2000 and 56 to 44 percent in 2004. Republican spin artists can say that Oberweis was a flawed candidate, that special elections are more volatile than general elections, etc., etc. But the bottom line is that this is very bad news for House Republicans. The seats of the former speaker and of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay are now held by Democrats.

Barack Obama cut a spot for Foster, and his home state popularity does suggest that Republicans could lose other Illinois open seats in November—the 11th and 18th districts—and Democrats could fare well in seats Republicans held marginally in 2006—the 6th, 10th, and 15th. And that Obama, at least at his current levels of popularity, could help Democratic House challengers elsewhere.

Demographically, the 14th is the fastest-growing Illinois district. Kane County, Hastert's home at the edge of the Chicago metropolitan area, is one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. This suggests that an Obama-led Democratic Party could be fully competitive in the exurbs, as the Mark Warner- and Tim Kaine-led Virginia Democratic Party has been in the exurbs of Washington, D.C. George W. Bush got huge margins in the exurbs; he carried 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in both 2000 and 2004. John McCain can't count on that kind of support in 2008.

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By the way, Barack Obama's 61-to-38 percent victory in Wyoming owed very much to two counties: Albany (Laramie) and Teton (Jackson Hole). They're both atypical of the state. Laramie is the home of the University of Wyoming, and some 24 percent of registered voters showed up—much more than in almost any other county in the state. Obama led there 75 to 24 percent. Teton County, filling up with liberal rich people who have made their money elsewhere and are now placing their residences in Wyoming, which does not have an income tax, was the only county in the state to vote for John Kerry in 2004. (In Idaho, similarly, the county that is by far the richest in the state, Blaine, home of Sun Valley, was the only county in Idaho to vote for Kerry, whose wife happens to have one of her five houses there.) In Teton County, it appears that 37 percent of registered Democrats showed up for the caucuses, and they voted 80 to 20 percent for Obama.

By way of comparison, the counties that historically have been the most Democratic in Wyoming, Carbon and Sweetwater on the Union Pacific Railroad line, had much lower turnout (10 and 8 percent of registered Democrats) and voted for Clinton. Albany and Teton counties produced a 1,329-vote margin for Obama, 64 percent of his 2,066-vote statewide margin. Carbon and Sweetwater counties produced a 99-vote margin for Clinton. The wealthy and highly educated seem to have replaced the white working class as the dominant force in the Democratic Party, even in gritty, down-to-earth Wyoming.

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Here is my U.S. News column this week, in which I take a look at the Democratic race after Hillary Clinton's victories in Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas. Both she and Barack Obama have problems, in my view. Obama is getting his first critical scrutiny in the campaign, while Clinton remains well behind in delegates. The Democrats' decades-long search for the perfect nominating system has produced the perfect storm.

Throw Out the Electoral Maps

Last week in my Creators Syndicate column, I argued that we should throw out that old map with the red states and blue states, that the partisan alignments in 2008 may look very different from those in 2000 and 2004. Evidence in support of my argument comes from SurveyUSA's 50-state surveys of a McCain-Obama race and a McCain-Clinton race. SurveyUSA puts Obama ahead in the electoral vote 280 to 258 (with Obama carrying two electoral votes in Nebraska by winning the Omaha and Lincoln congressional districts but running too far behind in the wide-open-spaces Third District to carry the statewide vote) and Clinton ahead 276 to 262. As SurveyUSA points out, electoral votes are awarded even when the numbers for the two candidates are within the margin of error. What this says is that there would be two close races.

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