Chart of the Day: The Democratic Divide

After the electoral draw for the Democrats on Tuesday, the new meme emerging is that voters are divided along age, ethnic, income, and gender lines.

Hillary Clinton draws her support mostly from white, latino, female, older and less wealthy voters. Barack Obama is backed by black, male, younger, and more well-off voters.

How important is each component in the candidates support levels?

The first chart below shows the aggregated totals for all exit polls for states that held primaries on Tuesday, excluding Obama and Clinton's home states of New York and Illinois. The vote totals are normalized to the relative size of the population in each state.

The most striking result is that despite their smaller size in the overall population, Obama's advantage among blacks is offsetting Clinton's advantage among whites.

This second chart shows the normalized size of each of these constituencies and how they voted for Clinton and Obama. (The difference in each set of bars is what's shown in the first chart.)