Monday, March 10, 2008

Ethnic Has Many Meanings In Pennsylvania

The “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC is today awash with Class-B pundits. Howard Wolfson showed up on behalf of Hillary Clinton and David Axelrod appeared for Obama. A plethora of lesser pundits appeared in the spaces between. Axelrod says he’s counting on the African-Americans in Philadelphia to vote as a bloc for Barak Obama. Wolfson doesn’t think the inner city necessarily belongs to anyone and, in Philadelphia, has an independent streak which will be loyal to Hillary Clinton.

Another voting consideration is that Pennsylvania cities have a lot of blue-collar voters of mixed ethnicity, and a Hispanic vote that ranges between four and five percent. Ethnicity in Pennsylvania may mean Hungarian, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, or Lebanese, as much as it refers to Spanish or African-American origin. Many pundits predict that African-American voters in Pennsylvania will step outside of predictable bloc voting patterns as did the voters of Iowa and Vermont.

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