Martin County, KY is one of the poorest counties in America (whether by percentage of people in poverty -- 42%, one of the ten worst; or in median income -- one of the 35 lowest) and it is very white. That county voted for McCain, 76.5%-21.9%. It used to be that poor whites were a reliable constituency for Democrats. Such was clearly not the case in 2008. (Check the New York
Times' [url
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/explorer.html|Electoral Explorer[/url]. It's just amazing!)
Obama did well among poor non-whites everywhere, but poor whites utterly rejected him in surprising numbers. An illustration: Wilcox Co., Alabama, is the poorest county with a black majority, and it voted 71-29 for Obama. That's roughly the racial split, and that county has the 27th-highest poverty rate in the United States. I doubt that white people make high incomes in Wilcox County, Alabama.
Obama, I believe, did a very poor job of addressing structural, long-term poverty in America in 2008. He seems to have assumed that poor non-white people would vote for him (which they did) but seemed to ignore that white people could also be poor. To be sure, he won votes from people who feared going poor due to economic collapses, but for the long-term poor in America, such failures are irrelevant.
Long-term, structural poverty has become a third rail of American politics, something to be avoided because most of us don't want to think about it. Can Obama do something about it, such as raising consciences about it? One thing is certain: he can do nothing good for poor blacks without doing similar good for poor white people.
If in 2012, Obama is able to address structural poverty without offending the middle class, he wins in a Reagan-style landslide in 2012. That is a huge "if".
