Originally publiseh at Los Angeles Times
November 08, 2012|By Paul West, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over.
The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation"s social and political evolution — and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.
On Tuesday, Obama received the votes of barely 1 in 3 white males. That too was historic. It almost certainly was an all-time low for the winner of a presidential election that did not include a major third-party candidate.
"We"re not in the "50s any more," said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. "This election makes it clear that a single focus directed at white males, or at the white population in general, is not going to do it. And it"s not going to do it when the other party is focusing on energizing everybody else."
Exit poll data, gathered from interviews with voters as they left their polling places, showed that Obama"s support from whites was 4 percentage points lower than in 2008. But he won by drawing on a minority-voter base that was 2 percentage points larger, as a share of the overall electorate, than four years ago.
The president built his winning coalition on a series of election-year initiatives and issue differences with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. In the months leading up to the election, Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, unilaterally granted a form of limited legalization to young illegal immigrants and put abortion rights and contraception at the heart of a brutally effective anti-Romney attack ad campaign.
The result turned out to be an unbeatable combination: virtually universal support from black voters, who turned out as strongly as in 2008, plus decisive backing from members of the younger and fast-growing Latino and Asian American communities, who chose Obama over Romney by ratios of roughly 3 to 1. All of those groups contributed to Obama"s majority among women. (Gay voters, a far smaller group, went for Obama by a 54-point margin.)
"Obama lost a lot of votes among whites," said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist. "It was only because of high black turnout and the highest Latino turnout ever for a Democratic president that he won."
Obama planted his base in an America that is inexorably becoming more diverse. If left unchecked by Republicans, these demographic trends would give the Democrats a significant edge in future presidential elections.
Latinos were an essential element of Obama"s victories in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Colorado. States once considered reliably Republican in presidential elections will probably become highly competitive because of burgeoning Latino populations, sometimes in combination with large African American populations. North Carolina, where Obama won narrowly in 2008 and came close this time, is one. The Deep South state of Georgia is another. Texas and Arizona in the Southwest are future swing states — by 2020, if not sooner.
Besides demography, Obama had another edge: the voter-tracking operation that his campaign had built over the last six years, which generated increased turnout on Tuesday among young people and unmarried women.