Voting Blocs to Watch as 2012 Nears
There's a long way to go before next year's presidential election, but it's already possible to frame the decisive question: Will the giant demographic trends benefiting President Barack Obama and his Democrats be enough to offset the erosion caused by a poor economy?
Amid all the attention being paid to who will be elected in 2012, too little attention is paid to this matter of who will do the electing. The face of America is changing, and the political consequences next year will be enormous and complicated.
The core constituencies of the Democratic party—minorities, working women, educated voters in urban areas, younger voters—all are growing as a share of the electorate. Meanwhile, the white vote, where Republicans have done best, and where Mr. Obama's support has been sliding, continues to shrink as a share of the overall electorate.
That demographic wave is Mr. Obama's principal advantage heading into his re-election campaign, and it ought to spell good times for Democrats for years to come.
But wait: Republicans showed in the 2010 midterm elections that other forces can overcome this Democratic advantage. Turnout among those core Democratic constituencies dropped. Meanwhile, higher turnout among those who trend Republican—white voters overall, and senior citizens—overcame the Democrats' demographic advantage. In particular, a big move to the GOP among working-class white voters, crucial in swing states, helped produce big Republican gains.
Thus is the stage set for 2012. In a period of economic fatigue and disappointment, it's hard to imagine turnout among young voters and minorities next year topping that seen amid the historic pro-Obama wave of 2008. So the key question for Republicans is whether lower turnout among those natural Obama voters can be combined with a higher Republican vote among senior citizens and white working-class voters to block the president's re-election.
And the key question for Democrats is whether the president can show enough progress in creating jobs to win back some of those wavering white working-class votes, and sow enough doubts among senior citizens by portraying Republicans as enemies of Medicare and Social Security, blunting GOP advantages with the retiree set.
At the heart of all this political calculus is the changing racial mix of America. The percentage of white voters in presidential elections has dropped, from 87% in 1992 to 74% in 2008, according to statistics compiled by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that, along with Democratic firm Hart Research, conducts the Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll.
So winning the white vote decisively, as Republicans normally do, simply isn't enough to win a presidential election. When George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000, he won the white vote by 12 percentage points. In 2008, Republican John McCain won the white vote by precisely that same 12-point margin—yet lost the presidential election to Barack Obama.
In the intervening eight years, the Democrats' advantage among non-white voters grew enough to give Mr. Obama a comfortable victory.
Republicans' problems among the nation's growing bloc of Hispanic voters are the key here. In his losing 2008 race, Mr. McCain lost the Hispanic vote by a whopping 36 percentage points.
Moreover, Republicans' problems with minority voters merely add to their problems with younger voters, because a far higher share of young voters are minorities. Just 15% of Americans aged 65 and over are minorities, for example. But among those aged 18 to 29, the percentage of minorities is more than twice as high. Thus, doing poorly among minorities dovetails with doing poorly among younger voters.
Amid all those Democratic advantages, last year's midterm election revealed the party's soft underbelly: Turnout among its core constituencies isn't as reliable as it is among Republicans' core groups. Last year, the share of voters under the age of 30 dropped to 12%, from 18% in 2008. The share of votes cast by African-Americans dropped to 11% from 13%.
Meanwhile, the share of the votes cast by senior citizens rose significantly, to 21% in 2010 from 15% in 2008.
Hispanic turnout also dropped, but among those who did show up, Republicans did at least somewhat better. They still lost the Hispanic vote big, but by a 22-point margin rather than the 36-point margin in 2008. Perhaps more important, three Latinos won top state-wide offices in 2010, and all of them were Republicans.
A more significant improvement for Republicans came among working-class whites. Statistics compiled by Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund show that Democrats running for Congress lost among working-class whites by 10 percentage points in 2008; last year, Democrats lost the same group by 30 points.
All told, it's easy to identify the key constituencies to watch as the campaign unfolds: Hispanics, senior citizens and the white working-class.