Examining the Obama Coalition

There has been significant insinuation from the right, most clearly on display in Governor Romney's post-election "gifts to minorities" explanation for his loss, that Obama was able to eke out a victory due to his reliance on the old Democratic stratagem of identity politics. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard has a more (read: slightly more) academic take on this theory available here. The idea is that Obama, taking advantage of demographic shifts in the landscape of America, made enough micro-targeted promises to minority groups  to earn him their lopsided support, barely besting Romney's broad-based coalition of real Americans.


We've already tackled the idea that the Obama victory was in any way close, so we'll go ahead and move straight to notion of identity politics. To start with, the chart above makes it clear that the President received the majority of his vote, 56%, from white people. Roughly 24% of his vote was from African-Americans (doubling their share of the electorate at large at 12.2%), 14% from Hispanics (a little under the 16% of the public they make up), and roughly 4% of Asians, which is pretty much right in line with their ethnic representation.

Upon close (read: any) examination, it becomes clear that it was in fact Romney who had to rely on the politics of identity in order to build his coalition. His share of the black vote was only about a sixth of their demographic numbers, Hispanics less than half, and Asians about half. He was able to make this up in the white vote, which was a stunning 88% of his coalition, besting the percentage of whites in America by more than twenty points, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the 2010 U.S. census. The way he accomplished this was pretty obvious to anyone paying even more than casual attention to the election.

His pitch centered around restoring America to its halcyon days, undoing the welfare goodies that Obama was giving to freeloaders, closing the border and asking undocumented immigrants to self-deport, telling his donors explicitly, and his supporters in the language of the dog whistle, that he would restore white supremacy through a rollback of the welfare state and emphasis on personal responsibility. In the process of telling us that 47% of his opponents thought of themselves as victims, he tried to capitalize on the part of white America that sees itself as the victim of political revenge and demographic decline. In the end, the Romney campaign reduced its coalition to older, white, straight, southern men. The fact of the matter is there just aren't enough of this group remaining to coast to victory with only their support.

Clearly, this is a problem that is only going to get worse, and which will require significant course correction to avoid, as has been the topic of discussion among conservative apostates like David Frum and Bruce Bartlett, mainstream Republicans like Bobby Jindal as well as liberals who would like a reality-based loyal opposition party. I hope to address it myself in a future post. But to be clear, President Obama won re-election by carrying a broad demographic coalition of support. Governor Romney lost because he was unable to.