Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.
Although there was plenty of discussion during the 2012
presidential campaign about the Hispanic vote and how intense
black turnout would be, the press was preoccupied with the white
vote: the white working class, white women and upscale whites.
Largely missing from daily news stories were references to
research on how racial attitudes have changed under Obama, the
nation’s first black president. In fact, there has been an
interesting exploration of this subject among academics, but
before getting to that, let’s look back at some election
results. In the 16 presidential elections between 1952 and 2012,
only one Democratic candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, won a
majority of the white vote. There have been nine Democratic
presidential nominees who received a smaller percentage of the
white vote than Obama did in 2008 (43 percent) and four who
received less white support than Obama did in 2012 (39 percent).
In 2012, Obama won 39 percent of the white el