WHY WOULD LATINOS, ASIANS AND JEWS VOTE FOR A BLACK PARTY?:

White Flight: President Obama’s path to a second term may rely on states shaped by the same social forces he embodies. (Ronald Brownstein, January 7, 2011, National Journal)

By any standard, white voters’ rejection of Democrats in November’s elections was daunting and even historic.

Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans’ 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote.

Moreover, those results may understate the extent of the white flight from the Democratic Party, according to a National Journal analysis of previously unpublished exit-poll data provided by Edison Research.

The new data show that white voters not only strongly preferred Republican House and Senate candidates but also registered deep disappointment with President Obama’s performance, hostility toward the cornerstones of the current Democratic agenda, and widespread skepticism about the expansive role for Washington embedded in the party’s priorities. [...]

That resistance could, in turn, increase the pressure on Obama to accelerate the generation-long transformation of the Democratic electoral coalition that he pushed forward in 2008.

Is dividing America along racial lines really all that's left of the Obama moment?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2011 12:23 PM