The candidate bleeding a key demographic is...

...Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, according to the numbers. The mainstream media has been focused like a laser beam on Barack Obama's slippage in the blue collar white working class vote because of results in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It's part of the assessment of the electability factor.

The curious thing is that little attention has been paid to the support of black voters for Hillary Clinton, which has fallen off the cliff. This piece puts the hard facts out there. (NYT):

Have white Democrats soured on Obama? Apparently not. Although his unfavorable rating from the group is up five percentage points since last summer in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, his favorable rating is up just as much.

On the other hand, black Democrats’ opinion of Hillary Clinton has deteriorated substantially (her favorable rating among them is down 36 percentage points over the same period).

While a favorable opinion doesn’t necessarily translate into a vote, this should still give the Clintons (and the superdelegates) pause. Electability cuts both ways.

If Hillary Clinton should defy the odds (and the current math) and secure the nomination, she would be hard-pressed to defeat John McCain without the enthusiastic support of black voters, stalwarts of the Democratic base.

And the collapse isn't because of the affinity factor -- blacks voting for Obama solely because he's black. When a majority of whites abandoned the former president during Monicagate, blacks were among his most steadfast supporters. In this election cycle, that loyalty has only garnered a perceived slap in the face.

The "black vote" (as if it were some monolith) is a critical base of support for any Dem nominee, and Hillary Clinton is behind the 8-ball.

Many blacks are aghast that their extraordinary support of Bill Clinton in the past would be repaid by the Clintons with racial innuendo (in a Times/CBS News poll after the salacious 1998 Starr report was released, his unfavorable rating among whites climbed to 52 percent; among blacks it was only 10 percent). Some who stood by him then now apparently feel betrayed.

She cannot be elected without black support -- so why isn't this receiving equal attention in the MSM? Personally, I think there may be a couple of reasons -- 1) the conventional wisdom is that blacks will "come home" should Clinton manage to be the nom; 2) the MSM has a strong interest in keeping this horserace alive despite every single metric showing Clinton cannot win the nomination outside of a superdelegate fight. Those blinders are tight on the media horse.

As a result, a disturbing undercurrent has developed out there (and yes, also in the progressive community) that is a variation of the ludicrous Secret Black Radical Trojan Horse Agenda meme -- the black vote is holding the party hostage to get the Obama nomination it wants. It finally surfaced in this thread on MyDD, Updated: Black Vote Considered:

If blacks want to hold the democratic party hostage even with a black VP then lets break it open and reform it with a different platform with voters who will vote for that platform.

Obama is where he is because of non democratic party member votes.

...I also don't think that the AA vote voting 92% for a candidate is tolerable in the long term.

A couple of responses to the above:

Black people vote 92% for the DEMOCRATIC candidate all the time. have you EVER complained about that? have you said, "it's unacceptable for African Americans to suport the Dems 92% of the time"? of course not.

That's pretty rich coming from someone who says women won't vote for Obama if he is the nominee. One might even argue based on that attitude women are trying to hold the party hostage.

The whole thread is worth the read. The reaction of that initial commenter is interesting because of its naked irrationality; it clearly comes out of base fear and frustration. Yes, many black voters are energized about Barack Obama for a lot of reasons, one of which is that, if elected, he would be the first black president. But it's not the sole reason -- after all, if skin color ranked as the principal factor, then why hasn't there been a groundswell of black support for say, Alan Keyes or Cynthia McKinney?

And the memory of the commenter appears to be short as well -- when Hillary Clinton launched her campaign (and Obama was dealing with the "is he black enough" nonsense in the black community) she had considerable support from black voters. Then came South Carolina and Big Bill opened his mouth. And there was Bill Shaheen. And Bob Kerrey. And Geraldine Ferraro. And Andrew Cuomo. And Bob Johnson. You get the idea. Self-inflicted wounds. And those negatives went up -- certainly this is a topic worth exploring in depth, but the MSM prefers pumping the "Obama is losing white voters" story. These journalists and talking heads need to examine this graph and get a grip on reality.

H/t, Jack and Jill Politics.