Op-Ed: Can Obama Retain Enough Young Voters To Win Presidency?

Ruy Teixeira is a Democratic analyst of voting trends. He believes that Obama can still win the presidency without getting a majority of working-class white voters.

Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's supporters have remained remarkably stable during the Democratic presidential primaries. Obama has won consistently with young voters, African-Americans and wealthy liberal voters. Hillary Clinton has had strong appeal among women, blue-collar whites, older people and women. In particular, Mrs. Clinton has strongly connected with white voters who haven't attended or graduated from college. She has won by margins of two to one or better with these people in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana. Senator Obama of Illinois has done well with wealthier, more educated white people in states like Oregon where the environment is a prominent issue. Ruy Teixeira doesn't buy the argument of Hillary Clinton that she is better positioned to defeat McCain in the fall because she does better among the white, blue-collar voters than Obama. Blue-collar voters have shrunk in the electorate due to the information age and a decline in American manufacturing. In the article, Teixeira makes the poor argument that Al Gore still won the popular vote in 2000 while losing the white, working-class vote by 17 percentage points to George W. Bush. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost the Reagan Democrats vote by 23 points in 2004 but only lost the general election to Bush by three percentage points. If Gore and Kerry won these voters, Bush wouldn't be the president. However, recent political polls on Obama and McCain seem to prove Teixeira's point. ''A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Mr. Obama trailing by 12 percentage points with working-class whites; a poll by Quinnipiac University, showed him trailing by seven points. In each survey, Mr. Obama led over all by seven points.'' Another pollster by the name of Whit Ayres has the opposite view. He cites recent polls in Florida, Missouri and Michigan where there is significant resistance to Obama not only based on race but much more on culture. These white people don't like the fact that Obama is liberal and graduated from an Ivy League school like Harvard. Obama's camp concedes that he may lose white, working-class voters in the general election to McCain but this will be offset by his appeal to young and new voters that he is bringing into the system. If he is the nominee of the Democratic Party, he has to hope and pray that the 18-24 year old group goes to the polls on November 04.