Barack Obama has a maddeningly simple, yet challenging, puzzle laid out before him. Three of the puzzle's four pieces fit together nicely. The fourth piece is the tough one.
The first piece, African-Americans, is fabulous for the Democratic nominee. Obama is going to win the black vote by a wide margin and with a huge turnout, the biggest ever. The second piece is Hispanic voters. Although Obama's support among Latinos is not as monolithic and enthusiastic as it is among black voters, he is doing very well. His campaign just has to make sure that Hispanic voters turn out in high numbers on Election Day. The third piece can be variously defined as white voters who are 50 and younger, or as college-educated whites. Obama is also doing well among this group, well enough to win if everything else works out for him.
It's Obama's fourth puzzle piece that is problematic. Call it "whites age 50 or older," "working-class whites," "blue-collar whites," or even "older whites with less than a college education." But no matter what definition you use, this is the voting bloc that has not yet come together for Obama. These are the voters who are preventing him from fully exploiting President Bush's unpopularity, the weaknesses in the Republican Party, the lousy economy, and the unpopular war. If Obama were doing better with this key constituency, he would be winning this election by a landslide. But he's not.
Certainly, no Democrat is foolish enough to think that Obama, or any other Democrat, could win a majority of older, working-class white voters. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to do so. The question is whether Obama can attract enough of them to win. Pollster Thom Riehle estimates that white voters over 50 with less than a college education constitute 23 to 25 percent of the electorate and that Obama needs to win at least 43 to 45 percent of this bloc to become the next president.
It's unclear whether much of Obama's difficulty with this group is merely older voters' resisting change or whether it is reluctance to cast a vote for an African-American for president. If the problem isn't racism, maybe it is just that these voters haven't reached a comfort level with Obama. He is young. His government experience is predominantly in the Illinois Legislature and light on the federal and foreign-policy side -- enough of a weakness to cause hesitation among some fair-minded people. And perhaps the burden of proof for experience may be greater for a minority candidate than for a white guy, or for that matter, a white woman. I've certainly noticed that quite a few people who seemed to put a huge value on experience suddenly quieted down after McCain picked a credentially challenged running mate.
But for some white voters, Obama is just very different from anyone they've ever known well. Sure, they may have African-Americans friends, neighbors, or co-workers, but most older, working-class white voters have probably never been close to anyone who had an African parent. Although they have surely met people with unusual names, the odds are great that none of those names included "Barack" or "Obama." They may know people of many faiths, but not someone who had a father -- albeit, one who abandoned his family at an early age -- of the Islamic faith, or someone who attended a church with a pastor as bombastic and controversial as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. For that matter, many working-class, older white voters may never have met a community organizer or anyone who went to Columbia or Harvard.
So, for me, the question is whether Obama can win over enough older, working-class whites to close the sale.
Charlie Cook is a National Journal columnist.
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