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Working class white voters break for Obama in Oregon

05:51 PM PDT on Thursday, May 22, 2008

By JULIA SILVERMAN Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Sure, in Kentucky, in Indiana, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Sen. Barack Obama had trouble wooing the now-iconic white, working-class voter -- the soccer moms and NASCAR dads of 2008.

But in Oregon? Not so much.

An AP analysis of county-by-county voting results shows Obama won not only in counties stacked with the proverbial urban elite, but in more far-flung places like Curry, Josephine and Grant counties, home to more conservative, blue-collar Democrats, and sizable numbers of retirees.

KGW graphic

To be sure, his vote margins in such counties were narrower than in Multnomah, Lane and Benton Counties -- 69.5 percent of Corvallis-area residents voted for Obama, the highest percentage in the state.

But win he did, in Polk County by 55 percent, in Lincoln County by 53 percent and in Wasco County by just 61 votes. Those counties are stacked with the kinds of older, less-well-off Democrats that conventional wisdom suggests would have been Clinton voters.

Clinton did win 14 of 36 Oregon counties, but generally by narrow margins. Her biggest margin came in sparsely populated Morrow County, an agriculture stronghold along the Columbia River, where she got 60 percent of the vote.

A closer look at the numbers also shows a trend that surfaced in 2006 and may be accelerating. Democrats are gaining the upper hand in turning out their party's voters.

Traditionally, Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in Oregon, but Republicans have been able to get higher percentages of their voters to cast ballots, roughly making up for their numbers gap.

Part of the surge in Democratic turnout was driven by the hot presidential race between Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. But even in the mid Willamette Valley's 5th Congressional district, where Republicans had a down-and-dirty, high-interest primary, only 52 percent voted in the race between Kevin Mannix and Mike Erickson.

The Democratic Congressional primary in that district was a more low-key affair, but even so, 57 percent of the Democrats who live there cast ballots in the race.

Statewide, the turnout news was even bleaker for Republicans. Fifty-four percent of their party members voted, while 72 percent of Democrats filled out their ballots, buoyed by 115,000 new members the party has added since January.

The turnout and registration numbers give Democrats a big jump-start in a state both sides expect to be a presidential battleground in the fall. Traditionally, state parties are major players in get-out-the-vote efforts, which could forecast even more trouble for the GOP in November. The Oregon Republican Party has been plagued by debt and staff turnover recently, and has struggled with candidate recruitment.

And both parties are watching the "undervote," the number of voters who weighed in on the presidential race and then took a pass on the rest of the ballot. For example, on the Democratic side, 122,736 Democrats who voted in the Clinton and Obama race didn't bother to vote for attorney general. That's even though the winner, law professor John Kroger, is virtually certain to be the state's next top lawyer, since no Republican has entered the contest.

The high undervote numbers mean down-ballot candidates will have to work harder this fall to break through the reams of presidential coverage, or at least successfully attach themselves to the coattails of either Obama or the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Also, both parties will have to exert themselves to attract Oregon's large pool of nonaffiliated voters, who were substantially less engaged in the primary: Only 28 percent of nonaffiliated voters cast ballots, according to the Secretary of State Bill Bradbury's office.

That could be because of Oregon's "closed" primary system, which restricts anyone other than registered party members from voting for the party's candidates during primaries. And the results could give new urgency to an ongoing ballot measure effort to open up the entire primary ballot to all voters, regardless of their registration.

One more lesson from the 2008 primary results: In a Democratic primary, just winning Multnomah County isn't enough, even though it's home to the state's greatest concentration of Democrats.

Democratic Senate hopeful Steve Novick crushed his opponent, Oregon House Speaker, in Multnomah County, but lost almost everywhere else, including by big margins in Lane, Washington and Clackamas counties.

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