Macharia Gaitho
11 October 2008
column
Nairobi — American politics is tribal. Not in the sense of Kikuyu and Luo and Kalenjin and Kamba and all our competing ethnic groups, but is the racial and ethnic characteristics that make up the richly diverse country.
At the most basic level it is Black and White. Obama versus McCain. Then there are the Hispanics, a sizeable group with about 11 percent of the national vote to 14 percent for the black. There are the Asians as a distinct minority, and the largely forgotten and ignored native Americans.
Within the whites it gets very complicated. There are are majority White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. There are Catholics. There are Hispanic whites. There are religious or ethnic groups like the Jews; and there are the various white ethnicities - Italian, Greek, German, Dutch, Irish and many more that made the original melting pot.
Within the white community, for instance, political pollsters look not just at the distinctions above, but also at sub-genres like education, sexual orientation, region, occupation, rural or urban, farming or industrial, new industry (IT) or old industry (mining, motorplants) and so on.
Those are the Tribes of America that Barack Obama and John McCain are competing to win in one of the most compelling presidential election campaigns in US history.
Democratic candidate Barack Obama was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Saturday (today), just the latest stop in a whirlwind tour between the presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee last Tuesday and the final debate set for New York Wednesday.
Before Philadelphia he made numerous stops in Ohio; while his running mate Joe Biden campaigned in Florida, another key state that could decide the elections.
Republican candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin have also been equally busy in the week or so between the two debates, covering, sometimes together and sometimes separately - Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Winsconsin.
National opinion polls show Mr Obama increasing his lead over Mr McCain, going into double-digit 11 percentage points--52 percent to 41 percent--according to the latest Gallup daily tracking poll at the end of the week; a margin mirrored by the latest Newsweek poll. But outside the major national events such as the presidential debates, the campaign is being fought at the grassroots - block-by-block, town-by-town, state-by-state.
What matters in the American political system is not the national popular vote, but the state-by-state vote by which Electoral College that actually elects the president.
Already some states are already decided either way, some for Obama, some for McCain, so the candidates are concentrating their campaigns on the so-called battleground states where the outcome is still uncertain.
There is no need, for instance, for Mr Obama to spend too much in California where he already commands nearly 54 per cent of the popular vote to Mr McCain's 39 percent. The Republican candidate would not bother too much with the state's 55 Electoral College votes because he has little chance of overturning Mr Obama's majority.
The reverse hold true is another large state like Texas, 34 Electoral College votes, where Mr McCain holds an unassailable 51 percent to 38 percent advantage over Mr Obama.
So the campaigns are almost over in California and Texas, and a large number of other states that on the electoral are marked solid blue or solid red for Mr Obama and Mr McCain respectively.
But then there are the states where the election is being fought, that could be marked as light blue or pink depending on which side they lean.
There are also some states where the candidates are still in virtual ties, that could be marked as blue and red checks.
Almost all polls now show that if the certain states for either candidate are counted, Obama has a clear lead. If he also captures the states leaning strongly towards, the ones where he has more than a five percent margin, than all the key pollsters including Reuters, Newsweek, Zogby, Gallup and others give him an crushing victory over McCain in the electoral college votes.
Some estimates put Obama at just over the 270 electoral votes needed to secure victory, but most give him a clear margin of between 330 and 350 compared to between 190 and 210 for McCain.
Obama's tremendous surge is being attributed to the way in which he has steadily eaten into the regional and demographic groups that have been supportive of McCain or of the Republican party in general.
States like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri and a few others were just weeks ago as as solidly for McCain. Now they are seen as leaning for Obama or too close to call.
According to the conventional wisdom of electoral demographics, Obama's key support comes from non-white groups including blacks and Hispanics; the youthful 18-29 age group; those with postgraduate educations; women; the urban poor, mostly black; and groups that are ambivalent towards religion.
McCain's strengths have been among whites, other than Hispanic; senior citizens over 65 years; the traditional white Anglo-Saxons protestants (WASPS) and whites who attend church frequently or for whom religion is important.
On the demographic map therefore McCain's support base has been in the traditional republican bastions, the middle and central USA largely agricultural bastions of conservatism; whole Obama's has been in the big cities in the in the modern and highly populated west coast and east coast. His support among whites has been limited, as described above, to young, modern, well-educated urbanites.
That is what has changed.
I was at an Obama campaign march in Nashville, Tennessee, last Tuesday on the same day the two presidential candidates had their second debate.
Nashville is cowboy country. It describes itself as the shrine of country music. Tennessee, as a whole, is a very white and conservative state guns, church and ranching are the defining characteristics. It is a solid red state where the 11 Electoral College votes are all but assured for McCain.
But observing the Obama march around the Belmont University, one could hardly have believed it. The participants were mostly white, as would be expected of Nashville. But they were not just the young, educated and modern white generation generally seen to side with McCain; the chanting crowd included middle-aged to elderly white men and women of the type that instinctively would be fearful and hostile to the prospects of an Obama presidency.
That is the demographic that Obama is stealing from McCain in states around the country; and the one that might secure him victory.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Nation. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
