Obama's strength with white voters

By Fester

A central tenet of the Emerging Democratic Majority theory is demographics favor Democrats. The voting population is becoming less white, less Christian of all sorts, less native born and bred for multiple generations and less rural. This has been playing out for a couple of cylces now and I think we should remember these broad trends when looking at electoral claims in 2008. Specifically I want to focus on the claim that Obama is unelectable because he is having signficant problems in capturing whtie votes in Appalachia.  Instead due to current polling performance AND the changing composition of the electorate, white voters may be a comparative strength for Obama and a problem spot for McCain. 

The Jed Report has the proportion of the white vote that Democrats have won since 1992. In all cases the white proportion is less than the overall proportion of the votes that the Democratic Presidential candidate won.

I neglected to make the point that that Obama's 43% support among white voters is actually strong -- especially in the wake of Wright. In 1992, Bill Clinton won 39% of white voters. In 1996, he won 43%. In 2000, Gore won 42%. In 2004, Kerry won 41%. So 43% is a pretty good starting point, especially with 7% undecided. (Obama currently trails McCain by 7%, while Gore lost by 12% and Kerry lost by 17%.)

This is not surprising as the Democratic Party is a pan-racial coalition party and minority groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. But winning the white vote is neither neccessary nor sufficient for a Democrat to win the White House. Instead Democrats can win the popular vote by keeping it close. And Obama can keep it sufficiently close as the available evidence supports the conclusion that Obama will be able to pick up roughly the same percentage of white voters as the previous Democrats. 2004 CNN exit polls showed 77% of the Presidential electorate was white. The 2000 CNN exit polls shows the white proportion of the electorate was 81% of all voters. The 1996 CNN exist polls showed that whites made up 83% of the electorate.

We are seeing confirmation that the white electorate share is shrinking and being replaced by non-white voters. I project that the 2008 white share is smaller than the 2004 share which was smaller than the 2000 share, and that was smaller than the 1996 share.

Right now the evidence shows Obama is doing as well as his peer group of Democrats in his proportional margin. More importantly, the relative importance and therefore the subgroup net margin is shrinking.

IF we project that Obama win's 41% of the White vote (same as Kerry) and that the white vote only constitutes 75% of the electorate instead of the 77% of the 2004 electorate, Obama picks up a one point on McCain compared to Kerry's net margin against Bush in 2004. This does not account for the fact that non-white voters break heavily for Democrats. Including that factor and Obama, assuming same exact demographic performance profile of John Kerry, will pick up an additional 1.5 to 1.6% of the vote, which breaks a 3 point Bush win to break even. I would posit that any Democrat believes that 2008 is a more favorable generic year than 2004. The basic takeaway of this post is that Obama, for a Democratic presumptive nominee, is doing fine with the white vote as the white vote is shrinking in comparative importance.