How Obama built a winning coalition

Democrat Barack Obama did better among white voters than his party's last two nominees, made inroads in rural areas, and fought Republican John McCain to a draw in suburbs around the nation.

He combined all of that with the near-unanimous backing of African Americans and overwhelming support among young voters, first-time voters and Hispanics to build the coalition that got him elected the first black president of the United States, according to exit polls for the television networks and the Associated Press.

Political scientists and strategists will slice and dice the numbers for years, but they provide an early explanation of how Obama became the first Democrat since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 to win more than 52 percent of the popular vote.

"The thing that struck me was how broad the coalition was - he didn't win it on a niche here and a niche there," said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin and Marshall College poll, which surveys nationally and in Pennsylvania. "Obama had a wide array of folks who supported him, in a range of age and demographic groups."

Pennsylvania's vote broke down along much the same demographic lines as the nation's.

Obama drew two-thirds of the vote among those below age 30, according to an analysis of the national data by the Pew Research Center. This age group was Democrat John Kerry's most fervent bloc of support in 2004, but he drew a far smaller majority - 54 percent.

Pew analysts consider this showing a critical part of Obama's win; young people made up 18 percent of the overall electorate - up one percentage point from four years ago.

Overall, whites preferred McCain over Obama by 55 percent to 43 percent, though Obama performed much better than Kerry, who lost whites by 17 points. Al Gore carried 42 percent of the white vote in 2000. Democrats have not carried a majority of the white vote since the exit polls debuted in 1972.

Obama won 95 percent support from black voters, who made up 13 percent of the electorate, an increase from 11 percent four years ago.

In the primaries, Obama struggled to win Hispanic votes. But on Tuesday he drew two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, substantially better than Kerry's 53 percent in 2004. Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing voting bloc.

Whites made up 74 percent of the electorate Tuesday - down from 81 percent in 2000, said Steven Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"That's a big shift in terms of the demographic composition of the electorate," Ansolabehere said, according to the Associated Press.

Another possible explanation for the drop in white voters as a percentage of the electorate, experts said, was that turnout rates were lower than usual in Republican strongholds such as Wyoming and South Dakota.

"I think they were discouraged," said Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University.

Voters living in suburbs, just under half the electorate overall, favored Obama by 50 percent to 48 percent, according to the exit polls.

People who told pollsters they were voting for the first time went for Obama over McCain, 69 percent to 30 percent. The Obama campaign ran huge registration operations, and new voters represented 11 percent of the total who cast ballots Tuesday.

Rural voters, who favored President Bush by 19 percentage points in 2004, leaned to McCain by 8, meaning Obama substantially improved his party's showing in the nation's countryside.

Obama won similar shares of the various demographic groups in Pennsylvania, winning the state by a stunning 11 percentage points.

Polls before the election had indicated Obama could have problems with white working-class voters in industrialized regions. He was crushed in Northeastern and Southwestern Pennsylvania by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the state's Democratic primary.

But the exit polls showed that only a fifth of Clinton supporters switched to McCain.

Obama romped in Scranton, this year's symbolic heart of blue-collar America, taking 63 percent of the vote in Lackawanna County, which includes the city.

McCain cruised in the state's rural center and in the southwestern counties around Pittsburgh, home to socially conservative Democrats, but there were not enough votes in those regions for him to avoid getting swamped by the Obama wave in Eastern Pennsylvania.

"There is a real dichotomy there because the East, and particularly the Southeast, has grown so much more favorable for Democrats," said Sen. Bob Casey, a Scranton native and early Obama supporter. He said Democrats needed to figure out why they have difficulty in the southwest.

McCain was able to hold on to several rock-solid Republican demographics, winning people over 65, white evangelical Christians, and those who frequently attend religious services. He won among Southerners, veterans, and supporters of the Iraq war.

Still, McCain's support among born-again Christians, a crucial part of the GOP base, fell to 73 percent, compared with Bush's 79 percent in 2004.

"Some of the drop-off may simply be that George Bush may have had a special relationship with evangelical voters, and it might have been difficult for McCain or any other [Republican] candidate to duplicate that," said John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics for the Pew Forum.

In addition, Democrats expanded outreach to Christians, and younger evangelicals tend to look at a wider set of issues than the traditional social-conservative opposition to abortion and gay marriage, scholars say.

The exit polls were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.

The data were based on in-person interviews with 17,836 voters in 300 precincts. In addition, 2,407 voters were interviewed by telephone to account for people who voted early in some states.

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