Obama's White Voters Problem

The increasingly visible racism that is being fanned by the GOP and its Christianist base is one of the hurdles facing Barack Obama in the 2012 election.  And some in the Christianist ranks of the GOP base no longer even try to hide their racism as the image above from a church group in Alabama illustrates as it invites "all white Christians" - the organizers of the event tried to explain away the racism this way:  

Organizers of the "all white" annual pastors conference explained why it's open to only white Christians.  William Collier said, "We don't have the facilities to accommodate other people. We haven't got any invitations to black muslim events. Of course, we are not invited to Jewish events and stuff."  Mel Lewis said, "We have a right as Americans to meet, to pray, to assemble. If someone is offended too bad."

But I digress from Obama's challenge.  There are simply too many whites who cannot seem to put Obama's race aside and support a president whose policies are actually in their own best interests.  Here are excerpts from Huffington Post that look at the issue of white voters and Obama in historical context:

 In the year after the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act was introduced into Congress, the president who stumped for it would be killed, his successor would face serious pushback from within his own party and a cadre of southern senators would spend more than seven weeks filibustering it..  .  .  .  .  The Civil Rights Act formally made it illegal to discriminate in public institutions, employment, union membership and federally funded programs.

Behind closed doors, however, Johnson was pessimistic about the electoral fallout of the law’s passage. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," he told Bill Moyers, his speechwriter.

Although though Johnson would win the presidency in a landslide that November -- bolstered by 94 percent of the black vote, a record that would hold until President Barack Obama's win in 2008 -- his concerns about the South proved justified.
 
As black voters flocked into the Democratic fold after the act's signing, white voters -- particularly in the South -- bolted. The 1964 election was the last time a Democratic candidate for president would win more than half of the nation’s white vote.  Richard Nixon would use the racial resentments of southern whites to help propel himself to the White House. The South has been solidly Republican in every election since.

"It's similar to white physical flight, but what we have here with white political flight," said Rick Jones, a political scientist at the University of Louisville.  It's an electoral problem that is especially pronounced for Obama. No president has won the White House with a smaller sliver of the white vote. The president's approval among white voters has dropped below 40 percent, and he trails Mitt Romney with that group by 13 percentage points.

“President Obama does not currently have enough white support to win re-election, even if he retains his minority base from 2008,” wrote David Paul Kuhn at Real Clear Politics. Obama won about 43 percent of the white vote in 2008, but needs about 38 percent of the white vote to win this fall, according to one pollster. (Obama pulled in 80 percent of the non-white vote in 2008.) 

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