Young voters not essential to Obama triumph

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

NEW YORK — If as the saying goes, “victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” among the “fathers” claiming credit for Barack Obama’s triumph are different demographic groups and Democratic constituencies.

It was union members who helped make Obama president, says the AFL-CIO. It was young voters who lifted him to victory. Latinos were crucial. Single women were decisive.

But wait a minute — would Obama have won anyway without, for instance, younger voters?

AnaMaria Arumi, who directs the exit poll desk for NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, has done the calculations based on the exit poll data and here is what she found: On a state-by-state level, when she re-ran the numbers as if there were no voters under 30, the only states that would switch to Republican presidential candidate John McCain are Indiana and North Carolina.

Without younger voters, Obama would still have won the 270 electoral votes he needs to become the next president.

What if there were no Latino voters?
In a counter-factual world in which there were no Latino voters, both New Mexico and Indiana would have switched into the McCain column. But Obama would have still won the electoral vote.

However, Arumi said, in the make-believe world where no African-Americans voted, while Obama still would have won most of the states that he won, McCain would have been able to take the hotly contested states of Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. 

The 107 electoral votes from those states would have been enough to shift the map in McCain’s favor.

It matters that Arumi did her calculations on a state-by-state basis — because it is the electoral votes of individual states and the District of Columbia and not the national popular vote that makes a candidate president.

Nationally, Obama's widest margin was among voters under 30. He won two-thirds of such voters, according to exit poll interviews.

Young voters in Virginia vs. Oklahoma
A close examination of a specific battleground state such as Virginia shows that 60 percent of Virginia voters under the age of 30 said they cast their ballots for Obama.

But for a contrast, take a state where McCain did very well, such as Oklahoma. In the Sooner State, just as in Virginia, about one-fifth of the voters were under age 30. And McCain won 60 percent of them. Not surprisingly McCain carried Oklahoma by a big margin, 32 percentage points.

So just as important as the differences between younger and older voters was simply where the voter lived: young people in Oklahoma tended to vote for McCain; young people in Virginia did not.

The problem for McCain is that there simply weren’t enough young voters in other states who were like the young voters in Oklahoma.

And younger voters in a heavily Democratic state such as California were not decisive in the outcome, just as their older aunts and uncles in California were not either.

That is because Democratic presidential candidates win California by such huge margins that the outcome there was never in doubt. Strategists knew at the outset that they could move California’s 55 electoral votes to the Democratic column.

What do we really know about the votes?
It’s important to note that the discussion about the relative importance of one demographic group or another is based on exit poll interviews with voters.

Video Mapping out a sea of blue Nov. 6: NBC's Political Director Chuck Todd looks at the Democratic party's dramatic gains in Congress. Nightly News

No election official knows for certain how many people in Virginia under age 30 voted — or for whom they voted. Ballots are not marked by the voter's age or any other distinguishing factor.

Likewise no one really knows for certain how many black voters in Virginia voted for McCain and how many for Obama.

And there are almost no voting precincts in the United States where 100 percent of the voters are young or black or Jewish or gun owners or members of any other single group.

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