On the morning after the election of Barack Obama, NBC TV coverage of the election noted: “Barack Obama won despite his race, not because of it.” I beg to differ.
A Washington Post-ABC News national poll puts black support of Obama at 95%. In 2008, blacks made up 13% of voters, up from 2004’s 11%. Barack Obama won the popular vote 52 to 46 percent, a difference of just 6%. The support of black voters made all the difference.
Now suppose the black vote had been split 50-50 between McCain and Obama — or 60 for Obama and 40 for McCain. Forty percent of the black vote — forty percent of the 13 percent — is 5.2% of the popular vote. So, if 40% of blacks had voted for McCain, Barack would have had 5.2% less of the popular vote and McCain, 5.2% more. Instead of a 52/46 Obama/McCain split, it would have been a 46.8/51.2 split.
If just 25% of blacks had voted for McCain, the split would have been 48.75% for Obama and 49.25% of the popular vote for McCain. Of course, that’s just the popular vote. I don’t have the resources to analyze, on a state by state basis, what the effect might have been on the electoral vote, but you can bet that the black vote made the difference between winning and losing some states.
Of course, if Obama had been white (which I believe he is) a majority of black voters still would have voted for him just because he’s a Democrat. [I’ve never really understood why blacks eschew the party of Lincoln in favor of the party of, well, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd and the like.]
Also (and this is strictly opinion) if Obama had been white, I don’t think he’d ever have won the nomination. Imagine, a first-term senator with no executive experience, no noteworthy legislative successes. Who would even consider such a person as presidential material?
When, in 2004, he addressed the Democratic National Convention while still an Illinois legislator, do you think he’d have had that opportunity if he’d been white? Really? I think he got that invitation because he was an up-and-coming black politician to watch. Without that national attention, he may not have even won his U.S. Senate seat. He had just two years of experience in the U.S. Senate before announcing his presidential candidacy. It’s hard to imagine anyone backing such an inexperienced candidate if he were white.
Given a percentage of voters who voted for Obama because they believed it was “time for a black president,” you’ll never convince me that Obama was elected “despite his race, not because of it.”