Voting analysis shows Obama won because of his support among blacks
Stephanie Schorow, MIT News Office
Some political observers have declared that the election of the first black president signals a new era of post-racial politics in the United States — but the data show otherwise, two MIT researchers say.
Through careful analysis of 2008 exit-poll data, the researchers found that Barack Obama won the election precisely because of his race, most significantly because of his appeal among black voters who turned out in record numbers.
“Ironically, the candidate whom commentators lionized for ending America’s debilitating racial divisions won the election on the basis of increasingly distinct white and nonwhite voting patterns,” wrote the two researchers — Charles H. Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Political Science at MIT; and Stephen Ansolabehere, professor of political science at MIT — in the current issue of Boston Review. “Racial polarization in American voting patterns was the highest it has been since the 1984 election.”Despite many predictions, Obama did not “provoke a backlash among white voters,” according to research compiled by Stewart and Ansolabehere. However, the percentage of blacks voting Democratic rose from 88 percent in 2004 to 95 percent in 2008. Hispanic voters — who had been drifting into the Republican camp in recent years — heavily favored Obama; Hispanics voting Democratic rose from 56 percent to 67 percent. “This additional support among nonwhites proved decisive,” Stewart and Ansolabehere concluded.
Indeed, “had blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004, McCain would have won,” they wrote.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/racialpolarization-0120.html