A look at how the Obama campaign mobilized Americans of every group to achieve victory in this election....
By Dan Balz, Published: November 7
Politics and presidential elections are stories of people, ideas and
numbers. On Tuesday night, as much as anything, numbers told a story of
how President Obama won a second term despite a climate that had long
favored Mitt Romney and the Republicans.
Through much of the year, Romney was running with winds at his back
— or, more accurately, with winds in Obama’s face. What Romney could
not overcome was the inexorable power of demographic change in a country
growing more diverse by the day.
That alone was enough to
confound Republican modelers, who either believed or hoped that the
electorate would look more like that of 2004 than 2008, both in its
racial and political makeup.
But it was not the only story.
Obama’s campaign, the most data-driven in the history of American
politics, tweaked the electorate in enough places and enough
constituencies to eke out victories in virtually every battleground
state that had looked competitive on the eve of the election.
Nothing
was inevitable about the president’s victory. But against the obstacles
in Obama’s path was a belief in Chicago in the glacial power of
demographic change. If not exactly a secret weapon, it was an
underappreciated asset, and its inexorable quality was seemingly
underestimated by Romney’s campaign and by many Republican strategists.
Obama
advisers were certain that the electorate would have fewer white voters
than it had in 2008, just as it had fewer in 2008 than in 2004 and in
elections before that. Since 1992, the share of the white vote has
fallen from 87 percent to 83 percent to 81 percent to 77 percent and
then to 74 percent in 2008.
On Tuesday, according to exit polls,
whites accounted for 72 percent. Obama received 39 percent of that white
vote, compared with 43 percent in 2008. That compares with the
42 percent Al Gore captured in 2000 and the 41 percent John F. Kerry
took in 2004. In fact, it is the lowest for any Democrat running in a
two-way contest since 1984, when Walter Mondale received 35 percent of
the white vote.
Obama offset his weak performance among white
voters by winning 78 percent of the non-white electorate. He captured
93 percent of the African American vote, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote
(up from 67 percent four years ago) and 73 percent of the Asian vote
(up from 62 percent in 2008).
That’s not the best any Democrat
has done. Obama won 80 percent of the non-white vote four years ago, and
Jimmy Carter took 82 percent in 1976, the highest share for any
Democrat in the past 40 years. At the time, however, non-whites made up
just 10 percent of the electorate, and African Americans accounted for
by far the largest share.
Obama’s campaign, though, did not rely
solely on the power of demographic change. It set out to maximize it as
much as possible. For the past 18 months, the team invested in what it
called Operation Vote, which was aimed exclusively at the key
constituencies that make up Obama’s coalition: African Americans,
Hispanics, young voters and women (particularly those with college
degrees.)
The decision to set up a parallel organizing team, to
supplement traditional mobilizing efforts that were geographically
based, was one of the upshots of the shellacking Obama and the Democrats
received in the 2010 midterm elections. Research showed the Obama camp
that voters are connected not only by geographically but also by what
one senior official called “common concerns” of their natural
constituencies.
Once they were identified, the campaign
communicated with them as directly as possible. For example, it targeted
places where these constituencies gathered and quietly bought
advertising in niche markets that appealed to them. The operation also
worked harder to recruit volunteers for get-out-the-vote efforts. In
2008, it often relied on younger volunteers from other states.
The
result was that, in Ohio, the share of the African American vote jumped
from 11 percent to 15 percent and Obama won 96 percent of the
demographic’s votes. In Florida, the Hispanic share of the vote grew
from 14 percent to 17 percent, and Obama increased his percentage from
57 to 60, doing well in Cuban American and non-Cuban Hispanic precincts.
The campaign can’t claim all the credit for the increases in the
African American or Latino share of the vote in some of these states.
But it was attentive to the constituencies needed to win and the places
it had to capture.
There was talk before the election that young
voters were not as energized as they were four years ago. But the share
of the vote accounted for by those age 18 to 29 rose from 18 percent to
19 percent. Nationally, Obama received a lower percentage of those young
voters this time, however, falling from 66 percent to 60 percent. But
in Florida, he increased his share from 61 percent to 66 percent.
In
other states, Obama slipped among young voters, but the campaign hardly
ignored them. The president campaigned repeatedly at colleges during
the fall and spent what an official called “huge” resources on local
organizing.
Because many votes are yet to be counted, it’s not
clear whether overall turnout nationally will be as high as it was in
2008. But the largest declines may be in states that were not considered
battlegrounds and that did not receive the attention and resources from
either campaign that the contested states got. The Obama campaign said
that unofficial numbers show turnout in four of the battlegrounds —
Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — was higher than it was four
years ago.
The coalition Obama assembled in 2008 is unique, doing
better among minorities and college-educated voters than other
Democrats have done. Democrats must ask whether it will outlast his
presidency. On Tuesday, that coalition was reassembled and proved just
big enough, in enough states, to give him a narrow victory in the
popular vote and a far more comfortable win in the Electoral College.
For previous columns by Dan Balz,
go to
postpolitics.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/obamas-coalition-campaign-deliver-a-second-term/2012/11/07/fb156970-2926-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_print.html
