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Some say it was his commanding lead among young voters. Others argue that young voters didn’t matter much at all, but African-Americans obviously did. Karl Rove thinks Obama won by registering new voters and getting a good number of them to the polls, which allowed him to pick up a slightly bigger share of churchgoers, independents, Latinos, and white guys. Other data crunchers say it happened because he siphoned off votes from the upper class or won over urban whites. A few note that he even made inroads among evangelical Christians. My old man offers his own personal evidence that some disgruntled Republicans turned blue after determining their party had been taken over by the right.
Even in Chicago the voting figures are more complicated than might be expected. As my colleague Ben Joravsky has noted, there were barely enough John McCain voters in black south-side wards to fill a CTA bus … a fact brought home to me as I rode around on a bus full of Obama supporters on Election Day morning, listening to an old veteran shout the triumphant message of the moment: “I voted for the right guy, and this time it wasn’t the white guy.”
