Sometimes I feel like a party pooper. Barack Obama’s victory was an emotional, inspiring, uplifting event. It was a moment of poetry in an age of prose. And here I come with something even worse than prose: those jagged, pesky things – numbers.
Bear with me, though; for those numbers lead to one clear conclusion. Unless Obama screws up badly, or the world economy undermines his presidency, he should win reelection in 2012 easily.
Each presidential election provides a rich harvest of data: campaign and exit polls, as well as the results themselves. The exit polls are especially useful because their national samples are so large: more than 17,000 this year; 13,000 four years ago. So it’s possible to look at different groups of the electorate with some confidence. A number of media reports have dipped into this year’s findings; but few have delved very far. Here are some of the key findings from the polls and the results themselves that have not received the attention they deserve.
1. Turnout was up, but not by as much as many predicted in advance. This year 126 million people voted, just four million more than in 2004. The rise in the number of black voters was offset by a lower turnout among white voters. Thus fewer people voted this time in states such as Vermont and South Dakota, with very few ethnic minority adults, while turnout was up sharply in more ethnically diverse states such as Colorado and North and South Carolina.
2. In the final four weeks – when more money was spent than in any previous month, than in any election in the history of the world – the net impact on support for the candidates was…. zero. That was not how it seemed at the time. Individual polls often indicated dramatic change. Obama’s reported lead varied between one per cent and 15 per cent. But if we take the five tracking polls that reported each day from early October, and calculate the daily averages, then the figure for every day between early October and 4 November (excluding the undecideds) was: Obama 52.5 per cent, plus or minus one; McCain 46 per cent, plus or minus one. The result? Obama 52.5 per cent, McCain 46.2 per cent. In aggregate, the polls had a good election. It was spoiled by their exaggerated claims of movements that were almost certainly the result of sampling fluctuations rather than real shifts.
3. Obama won 7 million more votes than John Kerry did four years ago, but fewer than 1 million of these extra votes came from white electors. Around half the increase in Obama’s support, compared with Kerry’s, came from African-American voters. Their turnout rose, so that 13 per cent of all voters were black, up from 11 per cent; and 95 per cent of them voted for Obama, compared with the 88 per cent of the smaller total who backed Kerry. More than 15 million African Americans voted for Obama, compared with fewer than 12 million who voted for Kerry.
In addition, Obama attracted the votes of almost 7 million Hispanic men and women, up from the 5 million who voted for Kerry. In 2004, Kerry enjoyed a modest 53-44 per cent advantage among this group; Obama won the Hispanic vote by two to one: 66-32 per cent. This massive shift helps to explain why he won such traditionally Republican states as Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
4. Let’s not be too scared of the religious fundamentalists: tolerance can also win elections. America’s 5 million gay voters divided 70-27 per cent for Obama, while the 7 million unmarried mothers preferred him over McCain by 74-25 per cent. Add in the votes of the 3.5 million unmarried fathers, and these three groups together provided Obama with 11 million votes, against 4.5 million for McCain.
5. It is no surprise that Obama won easily among those Americans whose family income is less than $50,000 a year (roughly £30,000). What is notable is that he also won, by a 52-46 per cent margin, among the 7 million Americans in the top family income bracket – more than $200,000 a year (£120,000). McCain did best among the moderately well off: families bringing in $100-150,000 a year (£60,000-90,000).
6. Fears that Obama would repel, and Sarah Palin attract, women voters did not materialise. Compared with Kerry, Obama’s support was up by five percentage points among both men and women. This meant that the gender gap remains as wide as ever. Men were evenly divided: 49 per cent for Obama, 48 per cent for McCain, while women preferred Obama by 56-43 per cent. But this is nothing new: it reflects a long-standing phenomenon of women being more Democrat than men. (This is the opposite to Britain where the much smaller gender gap works the other way, with women normally being more Conservative than men.)
7. On the other hand, the generation gap has just grown much wider. In 2004, Kerry led George W Bush by nine per cent among the under 30s, while Bush led by five per cent among the over 65s: a 14-point generation gap. That gap has now tripled, to 42 points. Obama led among the under 30s by a stonking 34 per cent (66-32 per cent), while McCain actually did slightly better than Bush among the over 65s, winning his own generation by eight per cent (53-45 per cent).
8. When voters were asked how they would have voted had Hillary Clinton been the Democrats’ candidate rather than Obama, the Democrats’ lead almost doubled from six points to 11. Fifteen per cent of those who said that they would have voted for Clinton actually voted for McCain – that’s almost 10 million people. Fewer than 4 million people voted for Obama who would have backed McCain rather than Clinton.
Now, to avoid misunderstanding, I am not saying that Clinton would have won a bigger victory than Obama. Maybe many of the new voters who were inspired by Obama would have stayed at home. And we can’t be sure of how the dynamics of a Clinton-McCain contest would have developed.
What these figures do tell us is that Obama did not maximise the potential support for the Democrats this year. This is confirmed by the votes for the Senate and House of Representatives: in general, Democratic candidates did slightly better than Obama. Even allowing for the fact that such contests are often intensely local, and split-ticket voting is common, it does look as if Obama could see his support grow.
There are echoes of what happened in Britain 30 years ago. Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives to victory in 1979, but a Mori poll showed that the Tories would have done even better under Edward Heath. It seems that the notion of a woman prime minister was just a bit too daring for some voters. By 1983, she had led the country for four years, including the Falklands war; her gender had become a non-issue; and the Tories (aided by Labour’s appalling incompetence) won by a landslide.
By the same token, some Democratic supporters probably withheld their vote from Obama because of his race. I would expect that residual problem largely to disappear by the time Obama seeks reelection and all bar the bitterest racists discover that it’s not so dreadful having a black president after all. Add to that America’s growing black and Hispanic populations, and Obama can look forward to a second clear victory in 2012.
All he has to do is govern competently, bring recovery to America’s economy and start to fix its health system and other social problems. Given what he has achieved so far, that should surely be a piece of cake.