Interesting information
To understand the difficulties Dems will face in a post-Obama environment, it’s essential to understand what happened in their recent nationwide wipe-out. Conventional wisdom argues that the main reason the administration and its allies went from champs to chumps involved the “paler and frailer” midterm electorate, with fewer minorities and young people than in the presidential contest of two years before. According to this assumption, reduced participation by blacks, Latinos and under-thirties allowed aging, angry white guys to dominate the Congressional elections and take over the Senate, governorships and state legislatures.
But the numbers indicate that voting goes down for every group in mid-terms – even declining somewhat for older white males. As a result, the percentage of black voters fell by only one point – from 13% in 2012 to 12% in 2014 – hardly a decisive or catastrophic collapse. The overall percentage of white voters increased only modestly in the Republicans’ recent triumph, hardly enough to explain the dramatically different outcomes in the two most recent contests. In 2012, white, non-Hispanic voters comprised 72% of the electorate; this week, in the mid-term elections, they amounted to 75%.
Moreover, among that white majority, Republican candidates in 2014 almost exactly replicated Mitt Romney’s dominance of two years before. The GOP nominee earned 59% of white voters against Barack Obama, while Republican candidates this year got 60%.
The real improvement for the GOP showed up in their electoral performance among non-white voters. Republicans of 2014 nearly doubled Romney’s pathetic 6% share of the black vote. They also significantly increased their percentage of Latino voters: scoring 36% instead of 27%. Most notably, they actually got a full 50% of Asian ballots (while making a major effort to reach out to this growing community), in stark contrast to Romney’s miserable Asian showing of 26% in 2012.
And what about the age factor? It’s true that young people voted at a lower rate in the mid-term elections – they always do when a presidential contest isn’t on the ballot. Among the 2014 electorate, voters below age 30 represented 13% of the total, compared to 19% of all voters in 2012. But similarly striking was the more competitive appeal of Republicans when it came to attracting these youthful citizens, drawing 43% this year instead of 37% just two years ago. Among all other age groups in the population, GOP support almost exactly replicated the results of 2012, so the difference-maker for 2014 wasn’t just that fewer young people showed up, but that Republicans also did much better among those who did.
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/medved-obama-role-race-and-gop-victoryhttp://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/04/us/politics/2014-exit-polls.html
