The Obama Campaign's Minority Blueprint

Sources close to the campaign say that in its internal planning the Obama team projects that the minority share of the vote in 2012 will rise to 28 percent. The campaign's analysis shows that minorities are continuing to increase their presence in voter registration rolls faster than whites.

There are reasons why the minority share of the vote might not reach 28 percent this year. A huge turnout among white conservatives could hold down (or even reduce) the non-white vote share even if more minorities vote than in 2008. (A bigger denominator, in other words, could dilute a larger numerator.) Unhappiness over the economy could also depress the minority performance; despite recent gains, African-Americans and Hispanics have been hit harder by the recession than whites. (In 2010, perhaps partly for that reason, the minority share of the vote fell off from 2008 more sharply than the decline between other recent presidential elections and the subsequent off-year contest.) Democrats also fear that voter identification laws passed by Republican-controlled states since 2008 could also suppress minority turnout.

Yet even with all those headwinds, the Obama team's expectation that minorities will rise to 28 percent of the electorate in 2008 hardly seems unreasonable. It would represent a smaller increase than the election-to-election trend over the past two decades, at a time when the Census Bureau has recorded a bigger increase in the minority population since 2000 than most experts expected. Democratic political analyst Ruy Teixeira, a demographic expert, also recently projected with Center for American Progress colleague John Halpin that the minority vote share would increase to 28 percent this November, and if anything might rise even faster. ("Exit poll data show minority vote share increasing at a faster rate last decade than overall population growth, so a 2 point estimated increase in minority vote share may actually be conservative," they wrote.)

If the minority vote share does reach the 28 percent the Obama campaign projects, that could allow the president to reach a national majority of the popular vote with a smaller share of the white vote than most people assume-and force Republicans to run up numbers among whites they have not matched in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

In 2008, Obama carried 80 percent of all non-white voters. If he matched that percentage in 2012, and those minority voters increase their share of the vote to 28 percent, he could win a national majority with just 38 percent of the white vote. There's no guarantee Obama could reach even that modest level. For most of 2011, his approval rating among whites ran below 40 percent in most surveys, and Democrats carried just 37 percent of whites in the House mid-term elections, according to the 2010 exit polls. In several Senate races that year (including New Hampshire, Arkansas and Indiana), the Democratic candidates fell below the 38 percent level.

Still, no Democratic presidential nominee has been held to less than 38 percent of the white vote since Walter Mondale carried just 35 percent when he was buried by Reagan's landslide in 1984. (Even Michael Dukakis reached 40 percent in 1988; Bill Clinton managed 39 percent in the three-way race that included Ross Perot in 1992). In the past four presidential elections, the Democratic share of the white vote has varied only between a low of 41 percent (for John Kerry against George W. Bush in 2004) and a high of 43 percent (for Clinton in 1996 and Obama last time.) And while Obama's approval rating is still running below 40 percent among whites in the weekly average of the Gallup nightly tracking poll, he reached 43 percent with them in last week's ABC/Washington Post survey and exactly 40 percent in today's CNN/ORC survey. Matched against Romney in a head-to-head match-up, Obama actually did slightly better: he attracted 42 percent of whites in the ABC/Washington Post survey, 44 percent in Pew's national poll this week, and 44 percent in the CNN/ORC survey.

All of that suggests that while it's conceivable Obama might fall below 38 percent among whites in November, Republicans probably don't want to bet on it. And that means if the minority share of the 2012 vote reaches the 28 percent Obama's campaign expects, it will be a high priority for the GOP nominee to prevent Obama from equaling his 80 percent performance among non-whites from 2008. The most recent polls show him on track to do so: though Obama's approval rating among Hispanics has sagged, both the ABC/Washington Post and Pew survey show him again attracting about four-fifths of non-whites against Romney; the CNN/ORC poll put Obama around three-fourths.

Just that seemingly small shift in Obama's minority performance could make a big difference in November. If the minority share of the vote increases to 28 percent, and Obama wins 75 percent of those voters, rather than his 80 percent from 2008, he would need to win 40 percent of the white vote to obtain a national majority. If Obama's performance among minority voters falls to the 73 percent Democrats attracted in the 2010 mid-term, he would need to attract 41 percent of whites in November to reach a national majority. Many things will happen before November, but in an improving economy, the Republicans probably have better odds of preventing Obama from reaching that threshold than suppressing his white vote to levels not seen in a presidential race since Reagan won 49 states.