Overall, President Obama did very poorly with whites on election day, but looks can be deceiving. Over at The New Republic, Nate Cohn has started to crunch some county-level numbers and what he has discovered in pretty depressing. Outside of the South and Appalachia, Romney actually did worse with whites than George W. Bush. But within the South and Appalachia, things got ugly.
Do you have a theory on why John Kerry carried Knott County, Kentucky by 27 points and Barack Obama just lost it by 47 points? Counties in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas showed the same thing. Obama ran 14 points behind Kerry in West Virginia. Obama won in affluent, well-educated suburbs. He did very well in heavily white states like New Hampshire, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He significantly over-performed Gore and Kerry in white states like Vermont, North Dakota, and Montana.
But, for some reason, white voters in the South and Appalachia just can’t stand the president. They dislike him more than they disliked the previous Democratic champions.
Their votes count just the same as anyone else’s, but their hostility to the president created the illusion of a much closer presidential contest than actually existed. Obama didn’t really have a problem with whites in most of the battleground states.
But what should really frighten Republicans is that whomever follows Obama, they should be able to hold the winning coalition he built and add to it a bunch of folks who only voted against the president because of some peculiar and unidentified quirk of Southern and Appalachian people that may not be repeatable. In other words, Missouri may be blue for a white chick.
