Sources of Democratic Voting Gaps

Following up on my last post, I thought it might be interesting to look "under the hood" of the Democratic voting gaps presented earlier. While it takes the behavior of two groups to make a "gap" there is no reason to assume that those groups favor their preferred candidates to the same degree. Indeed this is borne out by exit poll data from the 2008 Democratic primaries and caucuses:

The pattern so far in the season is pretty clear: groups supporting Barak Obama break to him much more decisively than Hillary Clinton's groups break to her.

Note: the data in this figure are based on averaging the voting gaps across states. The normal caveats about exit polls (earlier posts) apply.