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In my minutiae last month I posted a map of what
the 2008 U.S. electoral map would have looked like if only white men could
vote. The fact that Obama drew a grand total of 9% of the white male vote
in Alabama and Mississippi seemed particularly noteworthy. This prompted
a commenter on my livejournal
to ask how Gore and Kerry had done in those states. Good question! I don't
have Gore's numbers handy, but here's the 2004 map if only white men could
vote:
And here's a more precise version of the '08 map:
And that got me wondering about the trends here. Where did Obama do better than Kerry among white men, and where did he do worse? And more precisely, since '08 was the Democrats' year and '04 wasn't — since Obama did about nine and a half points better than Kerry overall — where did he overperform among white men, and where did he underperform? In the map below, the blue states are those where Obama did more than nine points better among white men than Kerry did. The red states are those in which his gains among white men lagged his gains among the population as a whole. And the states with white outlines are those where his presence on the ticket led to a drop in support among white men:
Obama did worse than Kerry among white men in Kerry's home region of southern New England, which is reasonable enough. He also did worse in his own home state of Illinois (backlash against his bailing on his Senate seat after only four years?). As for those other states... ...well, let's take Mississippi. White men in Mississippi supported Bush over Kerry by a margin of 81 to 18, for a 63-point gap. If white men in Mississippi had followed the trends of the nation as a whole, that gap should have shrunk to 53 or 54 points. Instead, McCain beat Obama by a margin of 90 to 9, an 81-point gap. For some reason.
Addendum
I was very interested to discover that the gender gap was greatest in New England and California, the very regions that conventional wisdom says are the most progressive in the U.S. It looks like there's really only one left-leaning state in which white men and white women have roughly the same politics: Washington. In all those other supposed liberal bastions, the big margins Democrats rack up among white voters can largely be attributed to women. Here's a map breaking down the extent to which Obama could have gotten by without his most favorable voting blocs:
The medium blue states he could have won with only the white vote (male and female). These states bring in another 113 electoral votes, for a total of 222. Still not enough! The light blue states show where the non-white vote was necessary for Obama to win. I don't have data for Omaha, but given that Obama picked up his electoral vote there by a 0.2% margin I'm going to assume it falls into this category. So that makes 143 electoral votes here, for a winning total of 365.
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The dark blue states he could have won with only the white male vote. These
states account for 106 electoral votes. I don't have data for white voters
in DC in '08, but in '04 white males went for Kerry by gigantic margins, so
let's give Obama 109.