Inspired by a post at MyDD.
Source: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/exit-polls.html
2008's Electorate:
Whites 74%
Blacks 13%
Hispanics 9%
Asians 2% (No information before 1992, in which case I split evenly)
Other 2% (Splitting evenly, because NYT ignores it for some reason)
This is probably useless at the moment, but it does emphasize again the demographic problems facing the Republicans. Throughout all of these elections, the Democratic numbers among Hispanics and Blacks stayed about constant, in the 80s to low 90s for blacks and in 60s or low 70s for Hispanics, not including 2004, when Bush improved considerably (though this did not continue into 2008). The Asian vote has steadily moved Democratic, and the white vote has fluctuated from election to election, though always tilted Republican. The white vote is shrinking, and the Asian and Hispanic vote is growing. What's the GOP to do?
The Republicans can no more blame demographics for recent failures in elections than they can blame the stars. The fault lies in appealing to nativism, classist ideology, and quasi-religious superstition. Blacks and Hispanics may on the whole poorer than whites, but they are less likely to believe in "pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die". The African-American heritage has been more confrontational toward entrenched power of white leadership; Hispanics on the whole find "pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die" alien. Black churches, even if their theology is identical to those of white Protestant fundamentalists, still have a distrust of power structures in which white people predominate. Most Hispanics are Roman Catholics; Roman Catholicism has its own idea of who goes to Heaven and who doesn't, and such does not depend upon how servile one is to oppressors. To be sure, Protestant fundamentalists have been making headway into some Latin-American communities in the US, but generally among those with lesser assimilation into Spanish culture -- but these have their own heritage of confrontation with entrenched elites who are very different. In their case it is Native-American populations against whiter Hispanics, and in America the white power structure differs in ethnicity.
Economic conditions do not themselves shape political culture. Middle-class blacks and Hispanics vote differently from middle-class whites, in part because non-white members of the middle class find their status shakier. They don't fully trust their white colleagues who might sell them out in hard times... perhaps because they have yet to experience rally hard times like the 1930s. (People who remember the Great Depression are no longer in the work force, and people who have seen the threat of a reprise in 2008 don't know how others will react).
In any society that proclaims democracy, nobody wants to be part of a permanent underclass. Democracy implies the right to confront political leadership, and that leadership that panders to rapacious, corrupt, selfish elites creates hostility with at first populist sentiments and then revolutionary sentiments. For society in general it is best that confrontations appear at the populist stage, before people start to starve and get cold, instead of at the revolutionary stage in which society polarizes into Reds and Whites. The populist-corporatist debate is acrimonious; that between Reds (Commies) and Whites (reactionaries) is murderous.
The dirty secret of race in 2008 is that the economic choices that the Rove/Cheney/Bush administration made may have hit blacks and Hispanics (probably also Asians) badly hurt most white people, too. For white people, voting for a black man for high office (Ed Brooke, Tom Bradley, Barack Obama) isn't as difficult as accepting one as a son-in-law.
