Voters Without Borders

when Republicans perform as bad with blacks and Hispanics, left of center pundits like Shaun state that it is a failure of the Republican message and that the Republicans change.

Yet, when Senator Obama performs as badly with blue collar and middle class whites, there seems to be a lack of a call for change.

Maybe Senator Obama should alternate his message of change from standard urban Democratic boilerplate to the standard suburban Democratic boilerplate.

It also goes to show that Senator Obama could be saying exactly the same thing about change and hope but if he was white instead of black, he would have dropped out of the race long ago.

Super,
Those green areas are not exactly filled with black people. They're just more educated on the whole than the blue counties. Obama does great in the middle class suburbs. He does great in the rural West. He obviously does great in cities. He does poorly among uneducated white people. Guess what? In a GE uneducated white men vote Republican (23 point margin for Bush in 2004) and uneducated white women are Hillary Clinton's core base, who are not exactly longing for a John McCain Presidency. Note that most of the blue counties in this map are Republican - and mostly for cultural and not economic reasons. They're actually the sort of Huckabee/Hillary counties that you see in many places in the South.

elrod,

The two most likely groups to vote Democratic are high school drop outs and people with post graduate degrees http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/...

Could you please give your reference for 23 point margin for uneducated (whatever uneducated means).

Clinton carry Bucks and Montgomery counties in PA where the suburban whites live. Obama won by the biggest margins in DC, Prince Georges County Maryland, and Baltimore City, Maryland. Three places with a total lack of blue collar whites but a ton of uneducated blacks.

I actually agree a bit with superdestroyer on one of his points, namely it is a flaw in the Democrat message that it has failed recently to reach certain groups of people. One cannot be all things to all people, but a national party should be able to speak in some way to all its people.

To the larger comments between super and Elrod, the racial profile of Obama voters is not easily characterized and makes it fascinating. Certainly, he polls extremely well in areas with large number of black voters. At the same time, the two states in which he won the largest percentage of the vote were Idaho and Alaska -- states with a very small perentage of African-Americans, and one doesn't typically think of Idaho voters as sipping grande lattes from Starbucks as they mull what to do with their new doctorate in comparative lit.

That said, the thing I found most interesting on the county-by-county map was the blue Clinton swath running all the way from NY, but more western NY, all the way down through PA, OH, KY, and southern IN (likely) to Arkansas. Just a big stripe. For all the talk about Wright and Bosnia and flag pins and all, it sure looks like economic life-styles of the voters is determining votes more than anything else.

This time you did well, Shaun. Good job.

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"The two most likely groups to vote Democratic are high school drop outs and people with post graduate degrees "

Yes, with Dems it's feast or famine, largely famine. (Would be the likely result of far-left Dem politicies, too, economically! heh, heh)

"it is a flaw in the Democrat message that it has failed recently to reach certain groups of people"

Ditch the late-Sixties radical lunacy and anything reeking of it, and try to be more realistic. It would require something like the largely-fake-Potemkin-Village "Third Way" stuff the Dems did in the 1990s as a result of facing reality in the form of the 1994 elections. We're stuck in some way with over-sized (beyond proper and beyond Constitutional limits) federal government. At least try to do less harm!