The 2008 primaries have been the closest races in recent memory.
While McCain has wrapped up the Republican primary and is looking forward to the general election, the Democratic contest has dragged on long past when everyone thought it would be finished. The traditional wisdom that a candidate wins or loses in the first few contests has been completely overturned as the nomination process drags on.
Super Tuesday is in the past, and the Potomac Primary, Ohio and Texas too, landing us squarely on Pennsylvania as the last big contest.
And so the last two standing, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have descended on Pennsylvania, and will be here to stay until April 22nd.
For yesterday’s primary, The Daily Pennsylvanian sent reporters down to each polling station around campus to pick up results when polls closed. You can see the result here as a color coded map of how Penn voted. Interestingly many of the same campaign trends that hold across the country can be seen in miniature on Penn’s campus. We’ve color coded the map according to the results.
In total, from the polling stations around Penn’s campus, Obama won 71.5% of the vote. Dark blue indicates Clinton won less than 29% of the vote, light blue indicates she won more than 29%. Nationally, we’ve seen that younger voters strongly prefer Obama to Clinton. The difference even applies to upperclassmen versus freshmen.
The Quad and Hill, mostly freshmen, voted more strongly in favor of Obama than the high rises and off campus areas where fewer freshmen live.
Obama’s margin was highest in Division 18 where 80.3% of students voted for him. Division 18’s polling place was Steinberg-Dietrich Hall and contains Du Bois College House. It’s likely that Du Bois’s large population of black students voted overwhelmingly for Obama like much of the rest of Philadelphia’s black voters.
Sen. Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary, though final results are not yet known.
As soon as the crowd heard the news, as reported on CNN, they broke out into applause. Chants of “Hillary, Hillary for President” filled the ballroom of the hotel.
Final results are developing, but the last post I wrote had Gov. Rendell predicting a 7-8 percent win.
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