White Flight

By any standard, white voters’ rejection of Democrats in November’s elections was daunting and even historic.

Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans’ 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote.

Moreover, those results may understate the extent of the white flight from the Democratic Party, according to a National Journal analysis of previously unpublished exit-poll data provided by Edison Research.

The new data show that white voters not only strongly preferred Republican House and Senate candidates but also registered deep disappointment with President Obama’s performance, hostility toward the cornerstones of the current Democratic agenda, and widespread skepticism about the expansive role for Washington embedded in the party’s priorities. On each of those questions, minority voters expressed almost exactly the opposite view from whites.

Much can change in two years—as Obama’s own post-2008 odyssey demonstrates. These results, however, could carry profound implications for 2012. They suggest that economic recovery alone may not solve the president’s problems with many of the white voters who stampeded toward the Republican Party last year. “It comes down to that those voters are very skeptical of the expansion of government,” says Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams, a veteran strategist. “The voters who went with Obama in 2008 did not know what they were going to get with that vote. Now that they’ve seen the health care bill, the stimulus bill, the bailout, the cap-and-trade proposal—issue after issue, they don’t like what they see.”

That resistance could, in turn, increase the pressure on Obama to accelerate the generation-long transformation of the Democratic electoral coalition that he pushed forward in 2008. With so much of the white electorate, especially working-class whites, dubious about the president’s direction, to win a second term he will likely need to increase turnout and improve his showing among the groups that keyed his 2008 victory—minorities, young people, and white-collar white voters, especially women. In 2012, Obama may be forced to build his Electoral College map more around swing states where those voters are plentiful (such as Colorado, North Carolina, and even Arizona) and less on predominantly blue-collar and white states such as Ohio and Indiana that he captured in 2008.

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist, said in an interview that “it would be a mistake to take exit polls from a midterm election and extrapolate too far” toward 2012. Conditions—and the composition of the electorate—will change a great deal by then, he said. But he acknowledged that Obama must “reset” the public perception about his view of government’s role. Axelrod, who plans to return to Chicago next month to help direct the president’s reelection campaign, also made it clear that he sees as a “particularly instructive” model for 2012 the case of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado, who won his contest last fall by mobilizing enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.

Given the trends among the white electorate evident in these exit-poll findings, that formula might represent Obama’s most promising path to a second term. Because the 2010 elections dealt such a heavy blow to the Democrats’ old models of electoral success, the imperative of electoral transformation is looming ever larger for the president. “He has to make an effort to reclaim some of the lost [white] vote,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Democratic analysis and advocacy group. “But he’s got to push the new electorate harder.”