It isn't hard to pick out the Obama supporters

They're the charter-school entrepreneurs

as opposed to the public-school teachers

The management consultants

rather than the government lawyers

The hot-shot hedge-fund managers,

not the blue-collars

Hillary Clinton's campaign is capitalizing on an overlooked strain of feminism in blue-collar women - nurse's aides, factory workers, farmers, and single mothers - to help fuel her strength among the Democratic candidates for president.

Even many working-class women who have spent their lives in traditional roles at home and work have been animated by Clinton's effort to shatter what she has called "the highest, hardest glass ceiling."

In recent interviews, some of these Clinton supporters say that they have been impressed enough by her advocacy for healthcare and children to jettison their previous views of her as a brash, ambitious lawyer and politician.

Some said a female president would do things not just differently, but better.

"We need to have a woman president," said Honey Davis, 64, of Onawa, Iowa, a longtime nurse's aide who has diabetes. "A woman would be a little more tender-hearted toward the people, and knowledgeable about family issues."

In addition, Davis said, because of Clinton's experience watching the wheels of power grind while she was first lady, the New York senator "will have some ways of getting around the old-boy type of thing."

Clinton is viewed more favorably in general by women than men. Increased support among college-educated and professional women - her peers - helped fuel a late summer surge that nearly doubled her lead in the national polls.

But the backbone of her support, going back to her first US Senate race seven years ago, remains among those who resemble her the least - blue-collar and working-class women, as well as black women.

Analysts say she connects with working-class women emotionally by presenting an image as a fighter who has overcome obstacles in her life, and appeals to them politically by offering proposals that would help their pocketbooks.

Blue Collar Voters Support Her

Because She's Paid Her Dues

Probably the most important insight about the Democratic presidential contest so far comes care of the famed political pundit Nick Sobotka, a character from HBO's "The Wire."

Toward the end of season two, after all hell has broken loose at the Baltimore port, Nicky troops to the local stevedores union in search of work. But these are tough times for the stevedores.

What little work there is has already been parceled out to more experienced men. "Seniority sucks," Nicky sighs. To which another stevedore responds, "If you ain't senior."

What does this have to do with the looming death match between Barack Obama and the senator from Punjab?

A lot, as it happens. Pretty much every poll taken since the beginning of the year has shown two things:

First, that Hillary Clinton enjoys a sizeable cushion among working-class voters (a Gallup poll out Monday shows Hillary with a 10-point lead among voters with "some college" and a 23-point lead among voters with a high school education or less).

And second, that Hillary has a huge advantage on questions about which candidate has the "best experience" to be president (66 to 9 over Obama in an early June Washington Post poll).

These two details are not unrelated. In fact, it's pretty clear that working-class voters favor Hillary over Obama largely because they value experience. But it's the reason they value experience that's so interesting:

Working-class Democrats, and particularly unionized Democrats, tend to see seniority as the only acceptable way of divvying up sought-after work. (And what is the presidency if not the most sought-after job on the planet?)

For them, the problem with an inexperienced candidate isn't that he or she is unprepared to be president. It's that such a candidacy flies in the face of their basic sense of fairness.

Of course, it's possible that voters think experience is substantively, as opposed to just symbolically, important. But I doubt it. Consider the following paradox: Voters routinely tell pollsters that experience matters in their choice of presidential candidate.

The most obvious reason to demand experience, as my colleague John B. Judis has written, is that the American president has nearly unchecked power over U.S. foreign policy.

And yet the pre-presidential experience of four out of the last five White House occupants has consisted of governing a state — a job that affords few opportunities to dust off those Metternich quotes.

It's not that governors lack experience per se. Running a state is tough work. There's a legislature to deal with, a bureaucracy to manage, powerful interest groups to navigate.

Anyone who succeeds at these tasks must have genuine political skill. But the fact that this experience is irrelevant to the most important responsibility a president will face suggests voters don't necessarily deem experience to be important in its own right.

In the case of Hillary v. Obama, experience turns out to be most useful as a proxy for the vast sociological chasm between the two camps.

On the one hand, many of Hillary's most loyal supporters lack college degrees and toil away at low-skilled jobs.

Now if you happen to be a poorly educated worker who's nonetheless eking out a decent living, no prospect is more alarming than the thought of losing out one day because someone a little younger, a little flashier, leapt ahead of you in line.

There is a comforting order to the world you know. And that order demands that people pay their dues before getting promoted. The alternative is a bitter competition between you and your co-workers — and who knows how you'll fare in that? Solidarity is preferable to cut-throat competition.

In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who's paid her dues — first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York.

If, after all this, Hillary doesn't win the nomination, then the system they've bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down.

Obama's base, by contrast, consists primarily of his sociological peers: highly educated achievers who get paid to think abstractly and believe that compensation should reflect performance.

Nothing makes these meritocrats shudder like the thought of having the sharpest insight or the best proposal and yet still having to cool their heels while their less able, less creative elders plod ahead

. Even among educated voters (as opposed to voters in general), it's not hard to pick out the Obama supporters. They're the charter-school entrepreneurs as opposed to the public-school teachers; the management consultants rather than the government lawyers; the hot-shot hedge-fund managers rather than the stodgy CEOs.

The simple truth is that class determines

who you're likely to vote for

So if you want to understand why Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama so handily in Massachusetts [a good example] on Tsunami Tuesday, look no further than who lives here.

The bulk of the SouthCoast population is made up of the struggling working-class cities of Fall River and New Bedford and some blue-collar inner suburbs such as Fairhaven, Dartmouth and Somerset.

A much smaller number of people live in a sprinkling of very affluent suburbs such as Marion, Rochester and Lakeville.

But the majority of the population lives in the cities and, in the words of James Carville, for these people it's "the economy, stupid," that is always the issue.

"Clearly there was a voting pattern, both in the exit polling and in the demographics," said Rep. Bill Straus of Mattapoisett, a Clinton supporter.

It divided up by economic status and perhaps by education level, he said.

Working-class people — folks who are worried about whether they'll still have a job this time next year — don't have the luxury of agonizing over which candidate was the first to announce they are against the war in Iraq.

And people who are worried about how to pay for the excess health bills from their father-in-law's heart condition, or their kids' college educations, are fearful about wasting their precious vote on an impressive but largely unknown candidate — someone who may or may not help their economic circumstances.

So New Bedford voters on Tuesday — despite the much-hyped endorsements of glitterati such as Ted and Caroline Kennedy, Deval Patrick and John Kerry — cast their ballots by an astounding 70 percent to 27 percent margin for Sen. Clinton.

And Ted Kennedy, at least, remains popular in New Bedford!

In Fairhaven, where the folks are just a peg up the economic ladder from the city — maybe they can get by for two pay periods instead of one before getting into in financial trouble. So the results in Sen. Clinton's favor were the nearly same: 70 percent to 28 percent.

But travel down Route 6 a ways to more affluent Mattapoisett and Hillary wins by only 53 percent to 45 percent.

And then travel a little further down the road to even more affluent Marion and you'll find the only town on SouthCoast where Sen. Obama won handily, 53 percent to 44 percent.

But it wasn't just Marion that voted for Sen. Obama. The swells in Wellfleet, Truro, the Vineyard and Nantucket did, too. Meanwhile, the more mundane addresses on Cape Cod went the way of SouthCoast.

There was one exception to Sen. Clinton's dominance in the working and middle classes.

And it wasn't the working-class students at UMass Dartmouth — who, despite the fanfare about the youth vote, didn't vote for Sen. Obama in big enough numbers to bring him close to victory in the town of Dartmouth.

(Dartmouth and neighboring Westport voted for Sen. Clinton by almost identical margins: 67 to 30 and 67 to 29 percent, respectively.)

Maybe the students went home to vote, but the exit data indicated Massachusetts college students, and even male voters, split pretty evenly between Sens. Clinton and Obama.

The one exception on SouthCoast to the lower middle class/upper middle class divide were the minority communities in New Bedford.

Compare Sen. Clinton's margin over Sen. Obama in inner-city New Bedford (In Ward 4, she won 52 percent to 48 percent) to her margin in the nearly all-white far North End (in Ward 1, she won 70 percent to 30 percent).

Statewide, the blue-collar cities of Springfield, Worcester, Brockton, Lawrence and Lowell all voted for Hillary Clinton.

But Boston, with a blacker demographic, took understandable pride in the first African-Amercian candidate to be a serious presidential candidate.

It voted for Sen. Obama. And so did the affluent Boston suburbs, especially the academically oriented ones, from Cambridge to Concord.

None of this is to say that Barack Obama doesn't care about working-class people. A man who spent formative years as a community organizer in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago certainly does.

But the Clinton vote does describe a dynamic in which the themes around which Sen. Obama has built his campaign, the things he has been talking most about — changing the negative tone of politics and ending the war — are issues of greater concern to the affluent than to the workers.

And don't underestimate the appeal of Sen. Clinton's universal health care plan vs. Sen. Obama's plan, which doesn't quite cover everybody.

Sen. Obama's may indeed be the better plan on costs, but most blue-collar voters want government guarantees on health care and may lose the distinction.

"At this time, I'd say it's economic, and to some degree ethnic identification, that made the difference," Rep. Straus said.

Peter Ubertaccio, a Stonehill College professor, noted that powerful Massachusetts get-out-the-votes machines — run by folks with the power to give out government jobs, such as Boston Mayor Tom Menino and House Speaker Sal DiMasi — were supporting Sen. Clinton.

And it's true that respected local congressmen like Barney Frank and Jim McGovern made a big talk-radio push for Hillary in New Bedford, Fall River and Worcester.

But there was no organized machine getting out of the vote in New Bedford. It was hard to even find anyone giving rides to the polls.

And Mayor Scott Lang, out of step with his own city, even appeared at a Boston Obama rally, not to mention talking him up at the last minute on local talk radio.

The Clinton vote in places like New Bedford, Fall River and Worcester is evidence of something different. It's evidence of the long-standing different priorities in the Democratic Party between haves and have-nots.

But if the party does not pay closer attention to the have-nots in selecting its nominee, more than a few of the folks we used to call Reagan Democrats — folks who live in places like the close streets of New Bedford — may yet to drift over to that rabble-rouser, John McCain.