What Berlin, N.H. can teach Barack Obama

Obama won New Hampshire towns that are home to left-leaning, college educated and affluent voters, such as Peterborough, where he got 47 percent to Clinton’s 26 percent, and Exeter, where he got 43 percent to her 35 percent.

But one New Hampshire Democratic analyst said Obama’s number in Exeter was slightly worse than he’d have expected given the track record in Exeter of past liberal favorites such as Bradley and Paul Tsongas in 1992.

The Wilder/Bradley effect?
So here's the question that was being asked Wednesday, given that pre-primary polls showed Obama ahead of Clinton by 10 points or more: Did we see on Tuesday night a New Hampshire version of the Doug Wilder/Tom Bradley effect?

Obama spoke to this topic during the very first trip he made to New Hampshire in December 2006.

He noted that when black candidates Wilder and Bradley ran for governor of Virginia in 1989 and California in 1982, respectively, pre-election polls predicted that each would get a higher share of white voters than they in fact won on Election Day.

The theory was that white voters were reluctant to tell pollsters that they did not want to vote for a black candidate; so Wilder and Bradley over-performed in the pre-election surveys.

Obama argued in 2006 that race and skin color were dwindling as factors in elections and said Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford “actually surpassed what the polls would have indicated. That, I think, points to the progress we have made.”

Whether voters shied away from Obama because of his name, his skin color or his lack of experience in Washington is impossible to know. Exit polling did not ask about the race question.

Video   Sen. Obama discusses N.H. loss Jan. 9: New Hampshire Democratic primary runner-up Barack Obama talks with TODAY's Matt Lauer about his loss in Tuesday's election. Today show

Clinton surges among women
Scala said, “My gut tells me it was more a gender thing than a race thing.”

Clinton easily beat Obama and Edwards among women voters, who made up nearly 60 percent of the electorate.

Obama’s strategists are left with one inescapable lesson from Tuesday’s voting: Their candidate does not have sufficient appeal to older, less-educated, lower-income and Catholic voters.

The idea is that Obama and his stump speeches play better among wealthier, better educated people — and there aren’t enough of those voters to win a Democratic presidential primary.

An ideal focus group for Obama strategists in the next week or two would be a dozen lower-income voters in Connecticut and New Jersey, states that vote on Feb. 5.

Mix in a few senior citizens, too.

Maybe the folks in that group could tell Obama what he is saying, or not saying, that has caused him to fall flat with these voters.

"The fierce urgency of now" is not enough for them.

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