Laura McKenna sent me to this New York Times piece this morning. It’s interesting to find out that both my beloved and I are atypical Obama supporters, she being a middle-aged person of the female persuasion and I being a geezerly type of seventy. We are atypical for different reasons, of course–and that’s fun too. Here’s the Times writer’s description of “The Obama Democratic Party.”
The Obama Democratic Party is made up of younger voters (under 44), blacks, white men (to a more limited extent) and independents whose show of support accounted for his victories in states like Missouri. Their level of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama — their excitement about the possibility of an Obama White House — is palpable in their response to him, or in any conversation.
It may be that statewide it was independents whose support accounted for Obama’s narrow victory in Missouri (less than 10,000 votes out of 823,503 votes cast–you can see the raw figures here). But the Post-Dispatch is saying today that as election day played out it was a heavy turnout of African-American voters in St. Louis and St. Louis county that carried the vote for Obama. I am thinking that Obama is doing pretty well at picking up votes outside his base with the exception of one core group that may have been part of John Edwards’ base. Here’s the Times again:
Mr. Obama split the white male vote nationally with Mrs. Clinton, but there was an important geographical disparity there: White men in California voted for Mr. Obama but white men in Southern states like Alabama did not.
And according to the Times writer, “The question is what white men in Ohio will do next month, . . .” This observation, together with the fact that Clinton is generally thought to have a stronger appeal among working class voters, suggests to me that Obama needs to tune his message to appeal to the economic interests of workers in the midwest and south who may perceive themselves to be competing in the labor market with African American and Spanish speaking workers.
The way to do that will not to be with a coded appeal to nativism, something John Edwards steered close to, but with proposals for action to relieve economic distress. Clinton got out front on this one with her program to relieve the current economic crisis. But Obama might reclaim some lost territory if he’s smart and fast.