Voting Patterns

Ms Unhinged Malkin is using data of the white supremacist organization NumbersUSA, to prove that Latinos who voted for Hillary Clinton were "corruptly" naturalized under her husband's administration.

Is that really so? How can she be so certain that all of those who voted for Clinton are naturalized immigrants as opposed to old American Latino families with no links to their countries of origin?

This is the untold story of Super Tuesday. For all the talk from Democrats and Republicans about whether immigration is or is not a wedge issue in 2008, the fact of the matter is nobody is exit polling and on the look out for recently naturalized citizen voters.

More to the point for pundits who are scrambling to feign to know all things latino, nobody is going out of their way to define demographically what "Latino voter" means.

• Is a Latino a recent immigrant?
• Is a Latino a native Northern Mexican who never immigrated to the US?
• Is it Nuyoricans only or does it include also Puerto Ricans born in the island?
• When confusing Hispanic and Latino, are we also including people born in Spain and Portugal but naturalized in the United States?
• And how many generations does it take before you loose the identity politics moniker and become a "full American"?
• Too many people are tossing around the "Latinos only vote for white Democrats or the Clintons" without qualifying the term Latino or Hispanic and that's a problem.

I believe that Hillary Clinton won for 4 very important reasons :

1. The campaign was able to get as many registered Democrats to vote for her as possible.

2. Since most registered Democrats who came to vote were women, the "tear heard around the world" was successful in getting her the last minute sympathy vote from people who ...

3. would have otherwise voted for John Edwards.

I think it is clear that for Hillary Clinton to stay in the race she needs to beat John Edwards, not Barack Obama. Edwards ran a remarkable game in Iowa. Had he had as much money as Clinton, he probably would have beaten her by more than just 1%. I am not sure though that under the voting trends of Iowa, he would have been able to beat Barack Obama.

4. The Obama campaign has insisted in equating their "I am not a black candidate" campaign with a complete disregard for the colored blogosphere. Yesterday was the day that it showed how much that has cost them.

So let's look at the numbers, courtesy of MSNBC.com :