POLITICAL BRIEFING

LABOR VOTE: Results from the Maryland primary last week may offer clues to the Democratic presidential contests coming up in some Northern states. Maryland was the first state with a significant number of union members to have its primary; after the Super Tuesday contests in the lightly unionized South, the race will shift to heavily unionized states such as Michigan and Illinois (March 17), New York (April 7) and Pennsylvania (April 28). . . . Exit polls of Democratic voters in Maryland showed that Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, neither considered a close ally of Big Labor, divided the union vote, 36% and 34%, with Clinton holding the edge. . . . Among blue-collar union members, however, Clinton crushed Tsongas by 19 percentage points. That suggests Tsongas’ union votes may have come primarily from white-collar government employees and teachers--whose unions, ironically, have been most closely aligned with Clinton.