Mitt Romney’s advantage – huge leads among whites, Southerners

The many news stories in recent days about both presidential candidates targeting the female vote or President Obama courting the Hispanic electorate fail to state the obvious.

The flip side of those blocs of targeted voters is that Mitt Romney holds a huge lead among white voters. In fact, the media has largely ignored the fact that Obama is approaching the lowly levels of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis among whites.

The various polls show Obama’s backing among white voters ranges from 41 percent to 35 percent. Some analysts say the incumbent can squeak out a re-election win with as little as 38 percent support from whites.  Nonetheless, the lack of enthusiasm of support is quite extraordinary – and part of a pattern.

Here’s how Nate Cohn of The New Republic sums it up:

“In the modern political era, it has taken extraordinary circumstances for Democrats to perform so poorly. The last Democratic candidate to fall so low was Walter Mondale, who only won 35 percent of the white vote in 1984. Even Michael Dukakis won 40 percent of the white vote in 1988. In 2010, House Democrats only won 37 percent of the white vote -- the lowest (congressional) tally for any party since the 1820s. Those blowouts resulted in 400 or 500 electoral vote landslides and a historic 63-seat gain in the House, but in 2012 it would only provide Romney with a narrow victory, since the non-white share of the electorate promises to be higher than it was in any of those contests.”

At the same time, a recent Gallup poll raised eyebrows in political circles when it showed that Obama leads by four to six points in the West, Midwest and Northeast but trails Romney by 22 points in the South. Certainly, this coincides with polling that shows Obama is particularly weak among non-college educated whites.

But 22 points, more than twice the Southern margin posted by John McCain in 2008, is rather astounding. Some analysts say that, if those regional figures hold, there’s a good chance that Romney will win the popular vote and Obama could still pull out an Electoral College victory.

At some liberal websites, such as the Daily Kos, the reaction is a bit gleeful: “Romney is driving up big margins in Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other such presidentially irrelevant states? Good for him! I'm sure that'll be cold comfort as he loses the states that actually matter in the Midwest and West.”

But Cohn tries to put things into perspective by strongly suggesting that the Gallup poll is an outlier and most surveys show the race in the South is much closer.

Sadly, here’s an example offered by Cohn to prove his point that Romney’s lead in Dixie cannot be at the 22-point mark:

“For illustrative purposes, consider the most extreme example: Alabama. Obama won 10 percent of the white vote in 2008. That’s right. Ten percent. So if Obama lost every white person in Alabama and black turnout stayed at ’04 levels, Obama would only lose a net-15 points (since whites only represented 65 percent of Alabama voters in ‘08). And it’s an open question whether there’s room for Obama’s support to decline by double digits in the upland South, where Obama’s performance was the worst since Mondale.”