I was, of course, joking below about Hillary Clinton’s good chances among DC’s mostly female, mostly working class primary electorate. My working class neighbors and fellow Districters are, naturally, mostly black and, as such, don’t count as “working class” for the purposes of the media’s electoral analysis and the Clinton campaign has repeatedly emphasized that elections in states (or pseudo-state entities like DC and the Virgin Islands) with too many black people don’t count.
Still, it’s strange how wide this blackout net seems to have been cast. DC is one thing, but the Clinton campaign’s conceit that a white person can’t get ahead in the politics of Maryland and Virginia is just bizarre. Senator Ben Cardin, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Governor Martin O’Malley, Governor Tim Kaine, and Senator Jim Webb are all white Democrats who’ve had some success in the mid-Atlantic region. Cardin even had to run against a black guy in the primary. It’s true that Maryland, in particular, has relatively few white people (only Texas, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii are less white) but plenty of white folks seem to be doing okay. The real truth of the matter is that Clinton seems doomed in these states just because she’s chosen to not seriously contest them.