The warrior and the priest: how Clinton and Obama divide their party.(2008)(Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic Party)

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HILLARY CLINTON and Barack Obama fought to a draw on Super Tuesday. They won roughly the same number of delegates, and the popular-vote margin between them was 0.4 percent. But Yuval Levin pointed out something odd at NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE: In most of the 22 states with elections that day, the results were not at all close. Eleven states were blowouts for Obama: He won eight states by 24 points or more. Seven states gave Clinton lopsided victories.

If you divide the Democratic-primary vote by demographic group instead of state, you see the same pattern. Clinton and Obama have been roughly evenly matched overall, but that parity obscures the strong preferences of different subsets of the voting population. New Mexico was a close election. Two opposing landslides produced that tie: Exit polls showed that Obama took 60 percent of college graduates, while Clinton took 61 percent of voters without a college degree.

The candidates have two different coalitions--you might even say two different parties--within the party. The race has been tight nationally because those coalitions are roughly equal in size. But they are not equal in each state, which is why Clinton and Obama have each had large margins. If Obama pulls away, it will be because Clinton's coalition is surrendering control of the party to his. But even if the nomination does not go to Obama, his coalition probably represents the party's future.

Obama has, almost everywhere, been winning the votes of blacks. Affluent, highly educated voters have been in his corner. Young voters and irreligious voters have been on his side. White men in northern states have voted for him, and so have white women in states that don't have a lot of blacks. (A state with few blacks or a lot of blacks is a good state for Obama.) Independent voters have gone his way.

Clinton draws disproportionate support from white women. Her coalition includes more low-income voters, more union members, more Hispanics, and more white Catholics and Protestants. Older voters have favored her, and so have people who have a history of voting in Democratic primaries. Leave aside Illinois, Arkansas, and New York, which had strong ties to one or the other candidate, and these patterns have held almost everywhere.

Journalist Ron Brownstein wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times last spring on the tensions within the Democratic party: "Since the 1960s," he said, "Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues."