I'm at the Jefferson/Jackson dinner in Richmond, after having snuck in with a media pass with Todd Beeton of MyDD fame. The Obama team is more organized, with giant letters spelling Obama on either side of the room and outside. There are Clinton signs and supporters, but nothing close to the presence that Obama has.
Jerome Armstrong is here, doing streaming video for Mark Warner, who has plastered the Stuart Siegel Center with signs. This state is going to be an easy win for Obama; Ben Smith has the goods.
The math is really pretty simple, and Patashnik mentions it: Black voters, in 2004, made up 33 perceent of the Democratic primary electorate. Obama has been getting more than 80 percent of the black vote virtually everywhere, a lot more in some places. So working off that conservative 80 percent figure, he only needs 36 percent of the white vote. That's a Deep South margin.
But the Democratic primary voters in Virginia aren't the rural white voters, and Obama is, obviously, a powerful crossover candidate, if you'd even call him that. He won the white vote in California. More than a quarter of the Democratic primary voters in Virginia live in two congressional districts, which are the inner D.C. suburbs. Many more live in the next ring of suburbs. And the third highest turnout district is in heavily African-American Richmond. Democratic turnout gets sparser as you go south and west. (There are delegates to be had down south, but that's another story.)
In the 2006 primary between Jim Webb and Harris Miller, there was basically no participation from African-Americans, with the primary decided by the liberal white voters in the DC suburbs. Throw in a third of the electorate going 80% for Obama, and you get what Smith notices is a 52-37 lead.
The next few days are set up for a clear Obama delegate lead. Rumors are coming in of a route of Clinton in Washington.
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