Let's burn that bridge if and when we get to it.

I believe if you go back, no Democrat nominee for president since LBJ has won a majority of the white vote.

I do believe you mean white voters are 68 percent of the electorate instead of the populace. Shoot, white voters would barely count as being a majority of white populace.

John McCain is probably going to win whites and lose the presidency

Given that non-Hispanic whites are about 68% of the population, African-Americans are about 12%, and Asians about 5%, with Hispanics coming in at 15%, and no ethnic group is going to go 100% Obama . . . how does the math add up? Obama will have to when a majority of whites, even if a slim one, to win the White House (is that term racist now?), or an unusually large amount of white voters will have to stay home on election day.

This pattern seems familiar. Tom Bradley's election as mayor of Los Angeles was an alignment of westside, largely wealthy and professional liberals with minorities. This set a pattern that has controlled LA city hall since then.

Looking into it further, it seems cate is right: Carter and Clinton did not, apparently, get the majority of the white vote, at least according to Wikipedia. With Clinton there was arguably the Perot factor, but not with Carter . . . so how does that work, exactly? The caucasians just don't vote, where all the other ethnic groups do?

That just seems odd. Or is there something off about the Wikipedia figures?

To answer Kevin S. Willis:

Whites: 68% of electorate. Obama wins 43%. That's about 29% of the electorate.

Blacks: 12% of electorate. Obama wins 95%. That's 11.4%.

Hispanics: 15% of electorate. Obama wins 70%. 10.5%.

Other: 5%. Obama wins 50% (a conservative guess). 2.5%.

Can you add? That comes out to 53.4% of the total electorate which is more or less his margin in the polls right now.

So, yes, it is actually possible to win without getting a majority (or even very close to a majority) of white votes.

The emergent post-McGovern coalition uniting the professional class with minorities with the young and with the poor is not, as far as I can tell, considered a particularly legitimate demographic coalition.

It's legitimate if you win elections with it but it's not a very large coalition; it has some internal contradictions. If you can break out into the honky working/lower middle class, by the usual methods, you can shift from a small majority to a big one.

Otherwise, you risk the Karl Rove problem of tying three smallish groups together that don't get along so well, and then even were you inclined to govern well, it would be really hard to do so.

I am not clear at all that Obama is going to lose whites. If he does, it'll be by a small margin, which is not nothing.

max
['We shall see.']

Kevin,
Basically:

a*.68 + b*.32 > .50

can be satisfied for a e.g. 45% white vote + 65% non-white will win

Good post Ezra,

I don’t think shifting the focus away from the “West Virginian coal miners and Pennsylvanian machinists” is a failure of strategy. It is an evolution of strategy. As you posted, this group is shrinking in its influence. Obama’s people saw this and acted on it in a very successful way. They did the math and bet that they could get some of this group and then pick up the people that the republicans would not really compete for e.g., young, poor, minorities.

If I may make a crude analogy to Obama’s energy plan, a little oil here, a little wind and solar etc… now Obama’s hybrid campaign is cruising with the final lap to go. McCain’s SUV campaign is out of gas and his dependable electoral gas station just capped his purchase at $40.00.

Sigh. I realize there are many white people out there, not all of whom are Republicans, who have not quite come to terms with the idea of non-whites voting (and especially with having their votes count as 100% of a white vote), but what's done is done and they're just going to have to get used to it. The only appropriate responses to that line of questioning run the gamut from 'So?' to "I'm afraid I'm not quite sure what you're getting at." Or, if you're feeling especially generous "Then he'll be just like Clinton & Carter."

And my hunch is that's going to create some serious tensions and resentments in coming years as electoral outcomes increasingly reflect those demographic realities and Republicans work to leverage the cultural dissonance to sow a sense of unfairness about the outcome.


I think we are also fast approaching (or perhaps seeing in the review mirror) a wedge issue inflection point where, say, immigration serves not to pull some otherwise Democratic voters into the GOP column as it serves to marginalize an ever shrinking GOP base.

I realize that this is about electoral politics but I'm concerned about matters of substance, where the Democratic Party used to stick up for working people and seems to be slipping away from that. We saw some pretty unfortunate outbreaks of classism during the primaries and I tend to think the problem (and it is a problem) is going to grow rather than shrink. I can't see the budding electoral coalition as "progressive" if it decides to throw policy supporting working people and the poor out the window because they're unnecessary for electoral victory.

The problem with reporters thinking this way is a symptom of a larger problem: the way that the political dialogue in America fails to reflect the reality of America. Listening to politicians and the press you'd think we were a nation of simple good-natured white small-town factory workers, famers and small business owners . . . that whatever minorities exist are clustered into a few ghettos, that Florida is populated entirely by elderly Jews, etc. etc. etc.

my hunch is that's going to create some serious tensions and resentments in coming years as electoral outcomes increasingly reflect those demographic realities and Republicans work to leverage the cultural dissonance to sow a sense of unfairness about the outcome.

It depends. If OBama wins and has a successful presidency, we might see electoral politics de-racialized, at least on the white side of the fence. (The GOP has a lot of work to do before it has any hope of getting back a significant share of the black vote.) There is really no reason why Republicans should be more popular among whites, except for white racism/backlash/resentment.

A President Obama might be able to do with whites what FDR did with blacks. If working-class whites see themselves as being economically better off under the hypothetical Pres. Obama, the power of playing to white resentment is going to seriously dissipate. And the psychological effect of having a well-liked president with dark skin and an exotic name could be the death knell for the more virulent forms of xenophobia.

On the other hand, if Obama wins and his first term doesn't go well, you could see an electoral strategy from the GOP based on scapegoating blacks and immigrants that might end up working very well.

Otherwise, you risk the Karl Rove problem of tying three smallish groups together that don't get along so well, and then even were you inclined to govern well, it would be really hard to do so.

That's not the only problem. A big problem with a "Karl Rove Coalition" is that it's held together by a very thin thread. The 51% strategy works every time, until it doesn't, at which point the whole thing collapses very dramatically.

Tensions and resentments? Who cares? Doesn't every election end with tensions and resentments? As an older white voter, I'm sick of suffering tension and resentment each time my own dying, declining slice of the electorate saddles the nation with four more years of some belligerent, bigoted, willfully stupid exemplar of itself. Strangely, victory does not seem to have assuaged this group. May their tension and resentment be real this time.

As long as the White population is divided - they are basically 2 minorities. A Black/Hispanic/Asian coalition will lead this country into the future.

I've been struggling for awhile to put this into words, but there's definitely a odd demographic weighting among DC pundit types wherein white voters -- particularly white working class voters, and even more particularly older white working class voters, and even more particularly older white working class voters who live in between California and New York and in sparsely populated cities -- are somehow a more "authentic" foundation on which to build an electoral majority.

This looks accurate, but I think you're still leaving out some details, because there are subgroups of whites. Obama is likely to capture the Jewish vote. And atheists are a more amorphous group, but my intuition is that he has an advantage with them too. The only "authentic" foundation for an electoral majority comes from white Christians, according to the conventional wisdom.

This is exactly what I've been wondering about for quite a long time. Why do we have candidates (especially dems) who are vying for the white working class vote, when there are so many young (white and non white) and professional (white and non white) liberal-minds out there who would come out in droves to the voting booth if only someone spoke to them?

It's funny how Obama potentially losing by a relatively small margin among whites is a big problem for his legitimacy, but McCain potentially losing by one-party state levels among minorities says nothing about his legitimacy. Oh wait, it's not funny at all. It's a disgrace. Our discourse is so screwed up.