At RCP, Jay Cost brings the statistics and the scatterplot to show — as suspected — that Pennsylvania is indeed much like Ohio, and builds a model for both states based on the number of African Americans, how “upscale” white voters are, and the percentage of residents are aged 20-24 in a given county.  The model accounts for 70% of all variation in countywide vote returns in Ohio.   That is pretty darn good, though obviously 30% can make a big difference in a primary, so Cost’s analysis of Pennsylvania’s Congressional Districts is intentionally general. 

His analysis also seems pretty similar to the CD-by-CD analysis of former Abbie Hoffman protege and political reporter Al Giordano — with one possible exception.   Cost suggests that Barack Obama should do well in PA 01 (the state’s only minority-majority district), while Giordano suggests Obama may net only one delegate out of the district.  That seems like a major difference, except that I think the swing between the two would not be much more than two or three delegates.

In short, Cost and Giordano approached their task from quite different directions, but both seem to support the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is currently poised to do quite well.  It is an agreement made all the more interesting in that neither analysis had to consider the Obama-Rev. Wright-Trinity church controversy.