Obama & McCain By The Numbers

Of the 28 states, plus the District of Columbia, whose electoral votes Barack Obama has garnered from last Tuesday’s election, 27 were won with a higher percentage of the popular vote than John Kerry earned in 2004. The sole exception was in John Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts, where Obama earned an identical 62% of the votes as Kerry did last time around. That’s right, Obama from Illinois got the same proportion of total votes cast in the Bay State this year as did that state’s current junior U.S. Senator in 2004. Interestingly but not really suprisingly, the largest increase in vote percentage in a Kerry-blue state from 2004 to an Obama-blue state in 2008 was in the state where Obama was born, Hawaii, where he received 72% of the vote, which was 18 points higher than Kerry’s 54%.

Of the 22 states won by John McCain in 2008, however, 16 were by smaller percentages than George Bush won in 2004. One of the biggest surprises was that Bush earned a slightly higher percentage of overall votes than did McCain in McCain’s own home state of Arizona: 55% for Bush vs. 54% for McCain. Contrast that with Obama’s win of 62% of the votes in the Land of Lincoln (Kerry had carried Illinois with 55% of the vote in 2004). Of the remaining 6 states, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia were won with the same percentage as Bush earned in 2004. Only in Alaska (from whence comes McCain’s political soul mate), Louisiana & Arkansas with 1%, 2% & 5% respectively, did McCain fare better than Bush before him. I guess having Sarah The Mooseslayer on the GOP ticket actually did help McCain after all...in the deepest of deep-red states, Alaska, and it was only enough to get him a measly one percentage point more than Bush got last time around.

Also interesting (to me anyway) is how the so-called “Swing States” actually swung on Tueday. Of the 5 states listed as such by the New York Times (Florida, Indiana, North Carolina Ohio & Missouri), all but one of them went to Obama this year. It bears reminding that all 5 of these states went for Bush in 2004, so the fact that they were even in doubt even towards the end of the campaign was just not good news for the political pachyderms.

Of these Fab 5, it seems that only Missouri went for McCain this year, and that was by less than half the vote (McCain won 49%, only a fraction of a percentage more than Obama). The other 4 had the political red bled out of them : Florida (won by Obama with 51%), Indiana (which Obama won by besting Kerry’s percentage by 11 points, up to 50%), North Carolina (where Obama added 6 percentage points to Kerry’s 44%, ending up with 50% of the vote), and fence-sitting Ohio (with a 51% win). Now, it is for sure that the win percentages in these states are not (at least on their face) earth-shattering. Even if you put aside the glaring fact that Barack Obama is the first African-American to be elected to the nation's highest office, if you consider that the home state of racist & homophobe extraordinaire Jesse Helms, North Carolina, last cast its electoral votes for a Democrat 32 years ago when the Tarheels voted for Jimmy Carter, and that crimson Indiana (like Virginia, which Obama also surprisingly won) hadn’t voted (D) since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, it really puts into perspective just how truly historical Obama's win is.

Of course, Obama's election, in and of itself, & hopeful as is seems, doesn't mean fear & prejudice in our country are dead, and, unfortunately, it doesn't mean that racism as we know it has breathed its last; such plagues of humankind--just like poverty & sickness--will undoubtedly always be with us, in one form or another. I am hopeful that--at least where electing a leader is concerned--our country has brought Dr. King's all-too-elusive dream of judging a human being not by the color of his or her skin, but by the content of his or her character one step closer to reality.

One last thing, I was reading Information Please’s website, and I noticed that (no surprise) Barack Obama has received the most votes ever for a U.S. Presidential candidate (65+ million), but I didn’t know that at least the preliminary figures show that, while the junior Senator from Illinois set a record for the sheer number of votes received by a presidential candidate (over 3 million more votes than Bush in 2004), McCain’s vote total (about 57.1 million) is actually less than the previous 2nd place finisher, John Kerry, who “only” racked up a little over 59 million votes.

I also found some interesting info on those who did vote Tuesday. National exit polls show that President-Elect Obama's Hope & Change message apparently resounded with a good part of the electorate.

As regards demographics, in just about every category measured by exit polls since 1980, Obama seems to have outperformed the average Democratic Party candidate in every category (and even outperformed the average Republican Party candidate in most categories; notable exceptions: the numbers for the average Republican candidate were higher for Males, Whites, Voters aged 45 and older, Protestants, Suburban & Rural voters...none of those numbers are really surprising, though).

The numbers are really interesting, but I am personally most impressed by the Obama advantage in voters under the age of 30, and first-time voters. Those numbers are very telling, because the political party for whom the first-time voter casts his or her sacred vote tends to be the party with which they identify for most of their lives. As if the obvious political & even physical differences between Obama & McCain (not to mention their respective life stories) weren't enough, at the same time that Obama was establishing all-time highs in these categories for any presidential candidate, McCain was--as he has been all along in this campaign--Obama's polar opposite, garnering the lowest scores in these particular categories (even lower than Poppa Bush in his landslide loss to Bill Clinton in 1992) for any major political candidate since they've been keeping record.

Male voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 41%
Obama: 49%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 52%
McCain: 48%
McCain -4%

Female voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 49%
Obama: 56%
Obama +7%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 46%
McCain: 43%
McCain -3%

White voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 39%
Obama: 43%
Obama +4%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 54%
McCain: 55%
McCain +1%

Black voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 87%
Obama: 95%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 10%
McCain: 3%
McCain -7%

Non-white Hispanic voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 63%
Obama: 67%
Obama +4%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 32%
McCain: 31%
McCain -1%

Voters aged 18-29
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 47%
Obama: 66%
Obama +19%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 45%
McCain: 32%
McCain -13%

Voters aged 30-44
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 44%
Obama: 52%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 50%
McCain: 46%
McCain -4%

Voters aged 45-59
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 44%
Obama: 49%
Obama +5%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 50%
McCain: 49%
McCain -1%

Voters aged 60+
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 46%
Obama: 47%
Obama +1%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 50%
McCain: 51%
McCain +1%

Voters who are High School Graduates
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 48%
Obama: 52%
Obama +4%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 40%
McCain: 35%
McCain -5%

Voters with College or higher education
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 44%
Obama: 53%
Obama +9%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 49%
McCain: 45%
McCain -4%

First-Time Voters (info available starting in 1984)
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 48%
Obama: 69%
Obama +21%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 45%
McCain: 30%
McCain -15%

Protestant Voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 37%
Obama: 45%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 57%
McCain: 54%
McCain -3%

Catholic Voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 47%
Obama: 54%
Obama +7%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 47%
McCain: 45%
McCain -2%

Jewish Voters
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 70%
Obama: 78%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 25%
McCain: 21%
McCain -4%

Voters in Big Cities
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 64%
Obama: 70%
Obama +6%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 31%
McCain: 28%
McCain -3%

Voters in Suburbs (info available beginning 1988)
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 42%
Obama: 50%
Obama +8%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 51%
McCain: 48%
McCain -3%

Voters in Rural Areas
Ave. Democratic Candidate: 39%
Obama: 45%
Obama +6%

Ave. Republican Candidate: 53%
McCain: 53%
McCain 0%

Add all the foregoing presidential particulars to the fact that as the remaining few as-of-yet un-called U.S. Senate races come to their electoral end, the Democrats are edging closer & closer to the not-necessarily-magical-but-just-plain-old-politically-satisfying 60 votes to the news of Nancy Pelosi being awarded at least a dozen and a half new House Democrats, and you couldn’t blame the ruddy-red Republicans for feeling just a tad blue.

(As an FYI, other sources for the political numbers listed above are CNN and The New York Times.)

P.S. Just finished reading this article showing the further historical-ness (is that a real word???) of the election of 2008, to wit:

Obama's Democratic Party also gained seats in Congress for the second successive legislative election -- the first time since the Great Depression in the early 20th century that they have achieved that...

The article also provides the elephant party with a little of what I consider good advice as they do some long overdue political soul-searching, especially if they want to remain relevant at all in the new Post-Bush/Post-Neocon world:

US voters want the Republican Party, which took a beating in this week's general elections, to embrace progressiveness and work with Democratic president-elect Barack Obama to get America back on track, a poll showed Friday. ...71 percent said Republicans "should give Obama the benefit of the doubt and help him achieve his plans," against 24 percent who said it should oppose the progressive changes proposed by Obama...