The Democratic race so far, in one simple chart

Clinton has been winning by 2-1 margins in the South, margins she largely owes to black voters, who make up about half the Democratic electorate in many states and at least one-quarter everywhere else but Oklahoma (the one Southern state Sanders carried). But — and I don’t remember anyone predicting this, certainly I didn’t — Sanders is beating Clinton in the North.

The good news for Clinton is that those Southern states have given her a substantial national margin. The bad news for her is that after Tuesday, when Florida and North Carolina vote, the only Southern contests left are in Kentucky and West Virginia, which have black percentages well below the national average.

The other states voting on March 15 are Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, all in the North, though you can find a lot of people in southern Ohio and Illinois and many all over Missouri who speak with what this Michigan-raised observer considers Southern accents.

All three states also have significant black populations, and blacks will probably account for 15 to 25 percent of their turnout. But that was true of Michigan, too, which Clinton lost when blacks voted for her by a lower-than-Southern margin of about 65 to 28 percent and whites voted for Sanders by about 57 to 42 percent. Recent polling averages (numbers from realclearpolitics.com, rounded off, including all March polls except those reported this morning) in those three states look eerily similar to those in Michigan going into its March 8 primary, as the following chart shows.

If you just look at polls conducted over the weekend, with interviewing stretching into or confined to March 12 and 13, the numbers look like this, with the Michigan top line indicating its actual vote:

Could Clinton lose Ohio, Illinois and Missouri? If so, it would be in line with the one simple chart at the top of this blogpost. She’s a pretty strong primary candidate in the South. In the North, evidently, not so much.