Hillary Clinton’s Appalachian Problem

With a five-state sweep on Tuesday night, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s advisers began telling reporters that she had an advantage of 300 delegates over Bernie Sanders, a larger margin than she had ever faced while lagging Barack Obama eight years ago. That leaves Clinton with an open path to her party’s nomination, but if she claims it this summer she will do so with a very different coalition than the one that helped her put “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling.

On Tuesday night, Clinton greatly increased her margins in urban areas where Obama triumphed during the 2008 primaries, increasing her vote share by more than 10 percent in the counties that include Cincinnati and Cleveland, St. Louis, Charlotte and Raleigh. Indeed, Clinton has fully integrated the non-white parts of the Obama coalition, both in big cities and rural areas with large African-American populations. Her biggest gains in North Carolina came, as they did across Dixie, in majority-black counties. In both Edgecomb and Hertford, in the northeastern part of the state where the Piedmont meets the Coastal Plain, Clinton saw a gain of 41 percentage points.