Race will play a big part at the polls next week and has the potential to determine who will win the 2012 presidential election.
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Reports show that the Black and Hispanics voters who came out in record breaking numbers in 2008 tipped the scale in Barack Obama’s favor and played a mayor role in electing the nation’s first African American president. On the contrary, Obama actually lost the white vote to John McCain.
However, race will not only be a huge factor for Obama, it will affect both candidates. Obama needs to focus on limiting his losses among white voters, while GOP challenger Mitt Romney is counting on Blacks and Latinos not showing up on November 6th, since polls show that he has most white votes in the bag.
According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll in October, Obama trails Romney among whites by 18 percentage points, 39 percent to 57 percent.
The Hill explores how race translates into votes:
Given that whites represent about three-quarters of all voters, that five-point shift would equate to a 3.75-point change in the overall national result — more than enough to produce a completely different winner.
If that does not introduce enough uncertainty into the mix, consider this: Contrary to general belief, there is not unanimous agreement on how the electorate was composed in 2008.
The figures most frequently cited about 2008 — including those mentioned above — come from the nationwide exit poll results available on the website of CNN.
Those figures show that 74 percent of 2008 voters were white, 13 percent were black and nine percent were Hispanic. This represented a fall of two percentage points in the white vote total from 2004, an increase of three percentage points for the black vote, and a rise of one percentage point for the Hispanic vote.
The CNN exit poll came from interviews of almost 18,000 voters.
Head over to The Hill to read more.
SOURCE: The Hill
