1. When in doubt, blame the South. A Daily Kos commenter did some quick number crunching and found that when you take out the former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, Barack Obama and John McCain evenly split the white vote. McCain won the white vote on the whole only because of his 68 to 31 margin in the South and an even more overwhelming 79 to 20 margin in the Deep South (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina).
2. My predictions actually weren’t wildly off-base, but I did receive a little lesson in humility when the Georgia results were much less Obama-friendly than I suggested. That said, it’s worth noting that Obama performed 6 points better than John Kerry in Georgia, while McCain’s performance was down 6 points from George W. Bush’s showing in 2004. Given the Electoral College, the end result is still the same, but a +12 point swing is impressive nonetheless. I also missed the mark on Indiana, suggesting it would go McCain, when in fact Obama pulled out a victory. I probably didn’t win the election pool in my department, but we’ll see about that when the results are released.
3. LGBT, GOP, BLT, OMG: Barack Obama seems to have received a lower percentage of the gay vote than John Kerry (70% vs. 77%). Along with the heated debate surrounding the role black homophobia played in passing Proposition 8 in California, expect to see some controversy surrounding the relative significance of homophobia in the black community vs. racism in the white gay community. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it, but it should be interesting.
I’ve heard a lot of complaining about how the no on 8 people ran their campaign. One of the biggest complaints is that they failed frame the issue as a civil rights issue until very late in the game, which allowed the churches a head start into African-American and Latino communities framing it as a Biblical one.