The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt features the latest sudden lapse from the “new tone” of political civility in South Carolina, the latest from Wisconsin, and then last night’s… somewhat surprising primary results:

Happy Arkansas and Kentucky Primary Night, Mr. President!

After Hillary Clinton thrashed Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, I wrote that Obama would be the first president who would need to appoint an ambassador to that state.

Arkansas and Kentucky aren’t looking like very friendly territory, either.

Four in ten Democratic voters chose someone other than President Obama on Tuesday in primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky.

In Arkansas, John Wolfe — a perennial, long-shot candidate — took 41 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, with 71 percent of precincts reporting. Obama came in just under 60 percent. The Associated Press did not call the race for Obama until close to midnight.

And in Kentucky, 42 percent of Democrats chose “uncommitted” rather than cast a vote for the incumbent president. Obama took 58 percent, with 99 percent of precincts reporting.

“Considering that a felon in prison did about that well in West Virginia’s primary against Obama a few weeks back, perhaps the Democrats might consider the possibility that they are going to lose the general election,” writes Clayton Cramer.

Both of these states are considered deep red for 2012, but the demographics of Jacksonian white working-class voters in these states aren’t culturally all that different from voters in large swaths of swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and even northern Florida. (Yeah, Democrats aren’t going to contest the Tarheel State that much this year. Public Policy Polling will insist otherwise, but…)

Would an energy policy so opposed to coal production that the Vice President bellows, “no coal plants in America” be a factor in this region, by any chance?

Because not every American can become a “web designer” like “Julia.”

Jason Tolbert examines the Democrats’ proposal for redistricting in Arkansas, nicknamed the “pig trail”:

The Third Congressional District, ripe with predominately Republican voters, has about 110,000 too many people, while the fourth district and the first district each need to pick up several thousand new residents.

Thus, the Democrats playing with the new Congressional maps have come up with the solution of trying to pull out a Democratic area of the third instead of the Republican areas which line the borders.  The only concentration of reliably Democrat voters are in the Fayetteville area. Of course, the problem is Fayetteville is roughly 60 miles away from the fourth district with their Democrat voters tucked behind several hundred thousand voters in the Fort Smith area…

[The Fourth District lines proposed by Democrats go] around any population centers and take in roughly sixty miles of national forest to get to the Democratic voters in the Fayetteville area.

In their defense, most of the trees in that national forest have traditionally voted for Democrats.

If there’s a matching extension on the other side of the district, would that make this the “Pig Tail Restricting”?