If President Obama matches the 80 percent he won in 2008 among nonwhite voters, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and others, he can reassemble a national majority by attracting only about 40 percent of whites.
As Democrats have become fond of saying, that is a matter of arithmetic, so long as nonwhites represent at least as much as the roughly one-fourth of the electorate they constituted last time.
A new Apollo Group/National Journal Next America poll conducted just before last week’s debate in Denver found Obama straddling those make-or-break targets, capturing 39 percent of white voters and 81 percent of nonwhites. [cont.]
Steven Shepard, National Journal