looks like I was right about whites in the states that mattered. I was wrong about Appalachia and the Deep South, but Obama didn't need them as it turned out, and he never had a chance of winning LA, MS, TN, or AL, and only a very, very weak chance of winning WV.
The Muslim rumor failed and probably backfired. Obama's race didn't turn hurt him nearly as much as many thought it would for two reasons. First, he was able to use his "difference" to his advantage. Change vs more of the same. Nothing says change like a young black guy. Secondly, and far more importantly, he ran on the economy and specifically avoided running on black issues. How many times did you hear him mention police brutality or affirmative action?
The financial crisis enabled him to get over the issue of race.
This is a pretty standard excuse being used now, but is anyone else kind of skeptical? Anyone else notice that it appears the shift after that happened in very affluent normally Republican voting areas, and supposedly racist working class Democratic areas were always with him?
It's easy to use this as an excuse as to why Obama won Pennsylvania, but McCain still hadn't led in a poll there for almost 5 months when it happened.
What kind of data are you basing this on? I imagine it is hard to tell, since sub-sampling is notoriously difficult. But it seems to me that Obama was getting a lot of support from white suburban type of voters from the beginning and that the key problem he had was with white working-class voters. This I see as the reason for him being not better than tied despite all the dynamics working in favour of the Democrats.
It has been a mainstream opinion for a long time that blue-collar voters are more inclined to vote Democrat if they vote on economic issues, Republican if they vote on cultural values. From there, the logic is pretty straight-forward.
But, if you have sources that refute this, feel free. I'm ready to change my mind, since I haven't really researched this that carefully.
Stranger: 2 of your 3 points seem to be unrelated to the crisis, and explain why Obama did so well with suburban voters, not why he increased disproportinoately among them after the crisis struck (something I'm still not convinced of).
