The southern problem

  Some commentators, like Bill Maher, have been worrying over the fact that the Democrats have lost the self-identified "white" vote since the 1964 election.  Barack Obama did better than most, they say, but he still didn't win it.  And that, they believe, is a problem.

Now, I don't understand why it's a problem.  But let's put that aside for a moment.  Do the Democrats have a problem with self-identified whites in presidential elections?

I punched up the exit poll data to find out.  And what did I discover?  The following:

Share of the white vote:
                                             Obama    McCain
Former confederate states:       31%       68%
Other states:                            50%       49%
2004 blue states:                      52%       47%

To be clear, these are not arithmetical averages across states.  They are the share of self-identified "white" people who stated that they voted for each of the major candidates for the synthetic jurisdictions listed on the left.

The Congressional results aren't broken down as easily, but considering as the Democrats won 56% of the Congressional vote versus 52% of the presidential one, then I suspect that their share of the "white" vote was even higher. 

Question to readers:  is it a problem that southern whites really don't like Democrats? 

Comments

[David Allen]

Do you think that class and identity politics makes for good government? If not, then it might be a problem for doing something once elected, if not for getting elected in the first place.

[Peter]

Keep in mind that because many of the Southern states have grown considerably in recent decades some of the Southern whites who voted for Obama were recent migrants from other parts of the country. The flip side, of course, is that "native" Southern whites are even more Republican than the cited statistics would lead one to believe. I don't know if there are any statistics that might help break down the Southern white vote into natives and migrants.