Competing head-to-head with the nationally televised Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate and the results of the Michigan Republican Presidential Primary Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton's blowout 15-point win in the Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary got far less attention than it should have.

Mrs. Clinton did, in fact, win 55% of the votes, or those of 328,151 people.  But 40% of the votes, or those of 236,723 people, went to Uncommitted.  That needs context. 

When Michigan moved its primary up to January 15, the national party stripped the state of its delegates, rendering all those votes meaningless from the standpoint of nomination.  Barack Obama and John Edwards thus chose not to compete in Michigan and their names were not on the ballot.

Mrs. Clinton, at the time of campaign planning undoubtedly calculating that she would be the "inevitable" nominee and not wanting to diss an important general election state, had her name placed on the ballot.

She thus won, handily, but only against Uncommitted.  Think about those circumstances for a moment.

Hillary Clinton is the most divisive serious candidate in the race for the Presidency.  Polls have long and consistently found that, with minor fluctuations now and then, approximately 50% of voters say they will never vote for her.  But in Michigan, 40% of voters from her own party (and some independents) pro-actively voted against her by voting for Uncommitted.  Not for another candidate who they favored.  Uncommitted.

In Michigan, in nasty winter weather, a voter has to be really committed to go out and vote for Uncommitted.  That 40% did that is a remarkable political event.

Far more stunning were the votes from Michigan African-American Democrats, derived from CNN Exit Poll statistics.  Sixty-eight percent said they voted for Uncommitted and only thirty percent affirmatively for Mrs. Clinton.

It is true that Barack Obama's campaign urged supporters to vote for Uncommitted, but that does not appear to have been the type of massive effort necessary to actually get large numbers of people to the polls, particularly for what was mostly a symbolic vote.

It is equally true that racially-charged statements that slithered from the Clinton campaign in the weeks before the Michigan vote upset large numbers of voters, obviously African-Americans chiefly, but also others who view the tactics as yet another glaring example of the extent to which the Clintons and their machine will go to win.

Given the size of the vote for Uncommitted, there are very few numbers in the breakdown of the Exit Polls that can give much comfort to Mrs. Clinton.  She did relatively well with women, with the poor and with the poorly educated.  Not so well with men, young voters, urban voters, those who identified themselves as conservatives and those who identified themselves as independents.  Independents, which made up 18% of the voter total, actually voted 51% to 37% for Uncommitted vs. Mrs. Clinton.

In the grand scheme of things, the Michigan Clinton v. Uncommitted vote could be meaningless, given all the factors that contributed to it and the avalanche of state votes to come in short order.  But professionals who spend their lives making meaning from numbers would have to say, perhaps inappropriately using one of Mrs. Clinton's own inflammatory phrases from the last week, she has a lot of "spadework" to do if she is to get out of the weeds in her vile garden of ambition.