Exit polls: Obama's base mix of minorities, unmarried women, urban whites and young voters

By Alan Fram

Read the original article at Newsweek.

Barack Obama's formula for victory included a coalition of unmarried women, minorities and young whites and coaxing more votes from them than Democrats did in their 2004 presidential defeat, according to national exit polls of voters.

Obama also relied on one of politics' oldest truisms — it's hard to lose if you outnumber 'em.

In a year that consistently showed his supporters more enthusiastic than those backing Republican John McCain, four in 10 voters were Democrats while a third were from the GOP — the biggest partisan gap in exit polls dating to 1992.

For good measure, Obama won among independents. Exit poll results showed his core supporters also included moderates, liberals, people with postgraduate degrees and those who seldom attend religious services.

Looming above all else, of course, were the lumbering economy and the unpopular President Bush. No matter who they were, people troubled by the economy or unhappy with Bush were likelier to back Obama.

The man who will be the first African-American president got the votes of nearly all blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics. That was an improvement on 2004, when Democrat John Kerry won nine in 10 blacks and just over half of Hispanics.

While 56 percent of women backed Obama, the Democrat did even better among unmarried females. Seven in 10 of them voted for Obama, 8 percentage points better than Kerry.

Obama's performance with single women included winning six in 10 unmarried white women, also surpassing Kerry.

Two-thirds of voters under age 30 voted for Obama, another improvement from four years ago. He won 54 percent of whites under age 30, bettering Kerry by 10 percentage points.

Also backing the Democrat were working women, women with children, voters from union households and people earning under $50,000 a year. Most new voters supported him, and in a reflection of disaffection with Bush, so did about a fifth of those who voted for him in 2004 and a like number of conservatives.

In a cautionary note for the triumphant Obama, the survey showed he made little headway in prying two vote-rich groups from the GOP.

Obama trailed John McCain, the Arizona senator, by 18 percentage points among whites who haven't finished college, a modest improvement from Kerry four years ago. The Illinois senator also lagged McCain by 14 points among suburban whites — virtually duplicating Kerry's 2004 numbers.

Overall, whites preferred McCain over Obama 55 percent to 43 percent, an improvement for Obama on Kerry's 17-percentage-point shortfall. In exit polls dating to 1972, Democrats have never carried a majority of the white vote.

Whites who backed Obama tended to be urban residents, Easterners, Iraq war foes and people without guns.

Besides whites, Republicans and conservatives, McCain's solid voters included those over age 65, white evangelical and born-again Christians, and those who often attend services. He won strong support from Southerners, married people, gun owners, veterans, small-town and rural residents, and supporters of the Iraq war.

The complete results were from exit polling by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for The Associated Press and television networks conducted in 300 precincts nationally. The data was based on 17,836 voters, including telephone polling of 2,407 people who voted early, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1 percentage point for the entire sample, larger for subgroups.