SuperWednesday quarterbacking

This corner has never been too terribly interested in U.S. politics. But boy, this year it's fun fun fun!

But when one Canadian (of sorts) says:

I have talked about the color card before. Well, here is the reality of it. Last night African-American voters gave Obama 82 percent of their votes in New Jersey, 87 percent in Georgia and 84 percent in New Jersey. Now to be fair, he also captured more white votes in California than Clinton did.

This Canadian corner says "show me".

It's true that, in states with substantial African-American electorates, Obama did better among that demographic. The exit polls have shown massive bloc voting for Obama among African-American voters in the Democratic contests.

Looking at things geographically, Obama also did very well in certain urban areas (Oklahoma City, the major cities of Tennessee and Missouri, swaths of the Trenton and Newark urban complexes in New Jersey) where African-American populations tend to be concentrated in their respective states.

But at least on the state-by-state level the BlackVote/BlockVote theory starts to look very wobbly. Variations in vote-intent among various ethnicities is but one piece of a complicated electoral-math and electoral-geography puzzle, but if the political race were all about skin-colour race... what does it say about this Democratic nomination that Obama's best percentage showing so far is in the beautiful and Very Pale State of Idaho?

This calls for a scattergram!

For those who care about such minutiae, the R-squared value for this set is 0.0071.