Looking at the polls, this presidential election season is poised to give birth to the most racially polarized electorate in U.S. history.
Whites are backing Mitt Romney in historic numbers, while Obama is garnering historic levels of support among blacks, Latinos and Asians.
While the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has the president in a dead heat with his GOP opponent, recent surveys show wide swings in support based on race. In other words, it looks like white voters versus everyone else.
Looking at a composite of polls, Obama’s white support averages 37.9 percent, ranging from 35 percent to 41 percent—the share of white support he enjoyed in 2008. Meanwhile, Romney’s portion of the white electorate is somewhere between 53 and 59 percent—20 points higher than Obama in four major polls— if these figures are to be believed.
Meanwhile, among voters of color in general, the President has close to 80 percent support. With African-Americans, support is nearly exclusively in the Obama column at around 95 percent, the share he received in 2008.
Latinos favor the president by a 3-to-1 margin, with Obama maintaining a 74 percent to 26 percent lead, according to LD Vote Predict projections. In a tight race, turnout in the growing Hispanic population is key, though they are underrepresented in the electorate.
Similarly, Americans of Asian descent, now surpassing Latinos as the fastest growing immigrant group, prefer President Obama by an increasingly wide margin.
According to the National Asian American Survey, likely voters of Asian descent back Obama by a 50 to 19 percent margin, with 30 percent of voters undecided.
Among Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans are the most supportive of the president, at 68 percent to 5 percent. The approval rating for Obama in the Indian community is 88 percent, compared to 30 percent for Romney. This comes despite the right-wing anti-Obama stance of the nation’s two Indian-American governors, Nikki Haley (R-South Carolina) and Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana)—darlings of their party and the highest ranking elected officials in white-conservative dominant Southern states.
The survey also found very high support for the president among Japanese and Chinese Americans, strong support from Korean Americans and the least support among Filipino Americans, who are pro-Romney. Meanwhile, Vietnamese voters have been trending away from the GOP candidate.
Ultimately, the only poll that counts is the vote tally on Election Day. For Romney and Obama, it’s all in the numbers. And turnout, or lack of it, provides the key to victory.
According to the Brookings Institution, racial minorities will account for a slightly greater share of the electorate in 2012 than in 2008, with their enthusiasm providing the margin of victory for Obama in battleground states.
In states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia and Florida, Obama can lose the white vote and win the state if minority turnout is high. Stronger white allegiance is the path to a Romney victory, with 60 percent of the white vote conceivably allowing him to overcome scant support from elsewhere.
It is no wonder that people of color support President Obama in impressively large numbers. But there is something hidden behind the numbers.
Some commentators might argue that black voters and others will vote for Obama because he is black, while African-Americans voted for white Democratic presidential candidates in nearly equal numbers.
Their overwhelming preference for the president speaks to policy—the Democratic Party’s commitment to working families and social programs such as social security, Medicare and so-called Obamacare.
In contrast, the Republican Party has become a captive of its most extremist wing, and has made a conscious decision to go for broke and consolidate the white working-class vote. This includes Romney’s claims that Obama removed welfare work requirements to “shore up his base,” a thinly-veiled reference to the Reagan-era black “welfare queen” who made $150,000 through government checks she did not deserve.
Republicans have doubled down on intolerance, xenophobia, and the shunning of racial diversity as a winning strategy. Blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims and others need not apply—or vote, for that matter. They are not part of a winning Republican strategy. Rather than change their product to appeal to consumers who won’t buy it, the GOP has decided to eliminate those who won’t do business with them. Voter ID laws and Tea-Party-sponsored voter purge operations such as True the Vote are attempts to disenfranchise voters who will not vote Republican. Jim Greer, the former Florida GOP chair, told theGrio that voter fraud is a nonexistent issue, and voter ID a marketing tool to suppress the minority vote.
The voter suppression problem throughout America is so serious that the NAACP, the ACLU and other groups have called for international monitoring of U.S. elections. The Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE)—a United Nations affiliated group dealing with election integrity— has decided to dispatch diplomatic poll watchers throughout the country to monitor polling places on Election Day.
Meanwhile, in a move reminiscent of the civil rights era, Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General of Texas, threatened to arrest OSCE representatives for breaking the law.
Further, part of the Republican plan includes race baiting President Obama, and invoking stereotypes of black intelligence— naked appeals to racial solidarity, all for white votes. Disagreeing with the nation’s first black president over policy is legitimate. However, rejecting Obama because he is black is a virulent form of racial politics, the Southern Strategy injected with steroids.
Regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Sarah Palin penned a Facebook post titled, “Obama’s Shuck and Jive Ends With Benghazi Lies.”
Conservative talking head and provocateur Ann Coulter tweeted after the last presidential debate that “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.”
And birther mogul Donald Trump has offered to give $5 million to the president’s favorite charity if Obama will release all of his college and passport records.
If the GOP imperative is to win by maximizing the white vote and simultaneously ignoring or suppressing voters of color, that scheme could very well work in 2012, or not. But the browning complexion of the U.S. suggests this is their last election to make it happen. They are running out of time and white votes.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove