Tuesday’s primary voting laid bare a profound racial and ethnic divide among Democratic voters, with African-Americans overwhelmingly preferring Senator Barack Obama, while Latinos largely favoured Senator Hillary Clinton.The results of preliminary exit polls in nine key states indicate that Obama attracted the support of three-fourths to four-fifths of black voters, except in Clinton’s home state of New York. That pattern suggests that the first-term Illinois senator’s strong appeal among African-Africans — first on display in the South Carolina primary last month — is more widespread. It also indicates that Clinton is not the automatic heir to the wide popularity her husband enjoyed among Black voters while he was president.On the other hand, Tuesday’s contests were the first to feature states, such as California, with large Hispanic populations, and they selected Senator Clinton by smaller but consistent margins.The divergent choices by minority voters reflect broad issues of loyalty and identity, observers said, rather than specific differences in the candidates’ stances on issues. Obama’s strong appeal among black voters surfaced less than two weeks ago in South Carolina, where exit polls indicated that he defeated Clinton by a margin of 4 to 1 among that segment of the electorate. At the time of that primary, some political analysts contended that Clinton’s support among African-Americans had eroded sharply after Bill Clinton derided Obama’s claim of long-held opposition to the Iraq war as a “fairy tale”, and after Senator Clinton suggested that the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s vision only “began to be realised” after President Lyndon B Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.Still, Clinton benefited from the long allegiance Hispanics have felt toward the Clintons since her husband was in the White House.
