Presidential, social votes show changing mindsets

THOMAS BEAUMONT

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Tuesday’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results showed the Amer­i­can vot­ing pub­lic has not only become more per­ma­nently diverse in its makeup, but also in its mindset.

Obama bet, and won, on the assump­tion that the elec­torate would retain much of the age, eth­nic and racial diver­sity he brought out in 2008. But across the coun­try, vot­ers affirmed changes in social pol­icy that show a cul­ture chang­ing along with it.

The trend is trou­ble­some for Repub­li­cans, who nom­i­nated in Mitt Rom­ney a can­di­date who was more socially mod­er­ate than his rivals for the GOP nod and who tried in the campaign’s clos­ing days to reach out to the broader electorate.

“The coun­try is chang­ing and the peo­ple our party appeals to is a sta­tic group,” GOP strate­gist Mike Mur­phy said.

Younger vot­ers and minori­ties came to the polls at lev­els not far off from the his­toric coali­tion Obama assem­bled in 2008.

Vot­ers also altered the course of U.S. social pol­icy, vot­ing in Maine and Mary­land to approve same-sex mar­riage, while Wash­ing­ton state and Col­orado voted to legal­ize recre­ational use of marijuana.

In the heart­land, where the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion still runs deep, Min­nesota vot­ers defeated a pro­posed con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment to ban gay mar­riage. In Iowa, where oppo­nents of gay mar­riage ousted three state Supreme Court jus­tices two years ago, a fourth judge beat back a sim­i­lar attempt Tues­day and Repub­li­cans intent on pur­su­ing a con­sti­tu­tional ban failed to gain the sin­gle seat they needed.

On social issues, exit polls con­ducted Tues­day for The Asso­ci­ated Press found a pub­lic more apt to take the lib­eral posi­tion. For exam­ple, roughly 60 per­cent of vot­ers said abor­tion should be legal in all or most cases, the high­est share since the mid-1990s.

The real­ity caught off guard Repub­li­cans, who banked on an elec­torate more mono­lithic and more con­ser­v­a­tive than four years ago. And it fore­shad­owed changes over the next gen­er­a­tion that could put long-held Repub­li­can states onto the polit­i­cal bat­tle­ground maps of the future.

“Clearly, when you look at African-American and Latino vot­ers, they went over­whelm­ingly for the pres­i­dent,” said John Stine­man, a Repub­li­can strate­gist from Iowa. “And that’s cer­tainly a gap that’s going to require a lot of atten­tion from Republicans.”

The exit polls showed that vot­ers mir­rored the makeup of the elec­torate four years ago, when Obama shat­tered minor­ity vot­ing bar­ri­ers and drove young vot­ers to the polls unlike any can­di­date in generations.

White vot­ers made up 72 per­cent of the elec­torate — less than four years ago — while black vot­ers remained at 13 per­cent and His­pan­ics increased from 9 per­cent to 10 percent.

That flew in the face of GOP assump­tions that the fierce eco­nomic head­winds of the past three years and the pass­ing of the nov­elty of the first African-American pres­i­dent would trim Obama’s sup­port from black vot­ers, per­haps enough to make the dif­fer­ence in a close election.

How­ever, Obama car­ried Vir­ginia, the heart of the Old South, in part by hav­ing increased his record sup­port from black vot­ers there in 2008, which reached 18 per­cent, to more than 20 per­cent, accord­ing to Obama cam­paign inter­nal track­ing polls.

It was also reflected in turnout that matched his 2008 totals in places like Cleve­land, which helped Obama carry Ohio solidly despite Romney’s all-out effort there in the campaign’s final weeks.

“Repub­li­cans have been say­ing for months” that Obama’s black sup­port would slip, Demo­c­ra­tic poll­ster Paul Maslin said. “And what hap­pens? When African-Americans had the chance to affirm him, they came out in droves.”

Obama won in 2008 by car­ry­ing sev­eral long-held Repub­li­can states, includ­ing North Car­olina, Vir­ginia and Indi­ana. And while Rom­ney eas­ily car­ried Indi­ana and nar­rowly peeled back North Car­olina, the fact that Obama held Vir­ginia points to a long-term demo­graphic shift that sur­vived the pres­sures of the poor economy.

Obama car­ried every con­tested state except North Car­olina by aggres­sively reg­is­ter­ing first-time vot­ers. He matched his share of the youth vote from 2008, and nearly matched his sup­port from seniors.

In a sign these changes are more glacial than seis­mic, Obama, who announced his sup­port for gay mar­riage in May, lost North Car­olina, where vot­ers there over­whelm­ingly voted against allow­ing gay mar­riage the same month.

There also were signs divi­sions between oppo­nents had deepened.

Vot­ers were more ide­o­log­i­cally polar­ized than in 2008 or 2004. The share of mod­er­ates dipped slightly to 41 per­cent, while 25 per­cent called them­selves lib­eral, the high­est share say­ing so in recent sur­veys of vot­ers as they leave their polling places. Thirty-five per­cent called them­selves con­ser­v­a­tive, about the same as the pre­vi­ous two pres­i­den­tial contests.

The 2012 elec­torate mir­rored 2008 in terms of party iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and racial makeup, with self-identified Democ­rats top­ping Repub­li­cans and independents.

Dur­ing his vic­tory speech, Obama nod­ded to the Demo­c­ra­tic coali­tion he had held together.

“It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re black or white, or His­panic or Asian, or Native Amer­i­can, or young or old or rich or poor, able, dis­abled, gay or straight,” Obama told his crowd of sup­port­ers gath­ered in Chicago. “You can make it here in Amer­ica if you’re will­ing to try.”

Assump­tions by Rom­ney about the minor­ity and youth turnout weren’t the only ones that turned out to be wrong.

While vot­ers con­sid­ered the econ­omy the dri­ving issue in the elec­tion, they did not hold Obama wholly respon­si­ble, as Rom­ney long had assumed they would.

That real­iza­tion forced Rom­ney to pivot late in the cam­paign and attempt to turn the elec­tion into a choice of com­pet­ing visions. Repub­li­cans argued late in the cam­paign that Romney’s per­for­mance dur­ing the first of three debates had ener­gized a groundswell of enthu­si­asm seen in their polling.

But it seemed Obama’s sup­port was qui­etly amass­ing with more vigor, GOP strate­gists said.

“There really wasn’t an enthu­si­asm gap,” said Repub­li­can strate­gist Char­lie Black, an infor­mal Rom­ney adviser. “And inde­pen­dents didn’t break our way.”

Posted by AP News on Nov 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.