We have known for a long while that Barack Obama is on track to peform more strongly among white voters than either John Kerry or Al Gore. Now a new crunching of numbers indicates that Obama may run the strongest within this demographic of any Democrat since Jimmy Carter.

Barack Obama, the first black major party nominee, is positioned to win the largest share of white voters of any Democrat in more than three decades, according to an exclusive Politico analysis of recent Gallup and Pew Research Center polling.

The most recent two weeks of Gallup polling, which includes roughly 13,000 interviews, show 44 percent of non-Hispanic white voters presently support Obama -- the highest number for a Democrat since 47 percent of whites backed Jimmy Carter in 1976.

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No Democrat has won a majority of white voters since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. John McCain has shuffled between 48 percent and 50 percent support in recent weeks -- which would be the lowest share for a Republican candidate in a two-man race since Barry Goldwater's run.

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A Politico breakdown of the Pew polling shows dramatic improvement for Obama among whites since early September on the question of who would do a better job "improving the economy." White women, who last month were split, now believe Obama will do a better job "improving the economy" by a 49 to 35 percent margin. White men, who had favored McCain by 10 points, are now split with 41 percent preferring Obama and 43 percent McCain.

The growth in Obama's share of the white vote cannot be divorced from the growth in his share of the vote of the entire electorate, so the fact that, if the polling holds, Obama would be the first Democrat in 32 years to earn a majority of the popular vote makes it unsurprising that Obama would perform the best of any Democrat among white voters in that same time span. Nevertheless, there was an awful lot of squawking about whether or not Obama could earn the support of white voters -- squawking that at the time I argued was without base -- and these numbers ought to help put that to rest.

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Remember how Barack Obama was supposed to have been uniquely weak among White voters -- despite the fact that he runs ahead of both John Kerry and Al Gore among the demographic? Well, it turns out that it isn't Obama who is having the real problem with White voters, it's John McCain. Here's Marc Ambinder:

The Gap -- And There Really Is Only One Gap

It's white males. McCain wins them by double digits, he wins the election (probably). Obama keeps the margin to ten points or less, then he wins the election (probably). Time's latest polling gives McCain a seven point lead in that group with leanrers factored in. Even with a 3% percentage point racial premium fudge factor, it helps explain why Obama still leads. McCain is underperforming right now among white males.

Time magazine might spin a 5-point Obama lead as ominous for the Democrats' chances at the White House, and others might think that his 6-point lead in the latest CBS News also bodes poorly for him. In fact, despite the fact that Obama has led in virtually every national poll in the last two and a half months or so -- you can count on one hand the number of surveys in which McCain has led, and not all of them are particularly reputable -- and that Obama holds a a significant lead in the electoral college count almost regardless of whom you ask, it must be that it's Obama, and not McCain, who has got to figure out how to connect with voters. Unless, of course, it's not the numbers lying but folks in the establishment media misreading them, and it is McCain who is underperforming among key GOP demographics (including White men), who is struggling in the polls, and who is having difficulty cobbling together 270 electoral votes.

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Remember all of the talk about Barack Obama's unique weakness among White voters? I noted the absurdity of this assertion earlier this month, but I thought it would be worth passing on a portion of professor Alan Abramowitz's analysis on the issue.

So does Barack Obama have a problem with white voters? The answer is a resounding "yes." And so has every other Democratic presidential candidate in the past forty years. The last Democratic candidate for president to win a majority of the white vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Al Gore lost the white vote by 12 points in 2000. John Kerry lost the white vote by 17 points in 2004.

Based on five national polls that have been conducted this month--Gallup, Newsweek, Quinnipiac, CBS/New York Times, and ABC/Washington Post--Barack Obama is currently trailing John McCain by an average of nine points among white voters. So Obama is doing much better than John Kerry and a little better than Al Gore. In fact, the only Democratic presidential candidates in the past four decades who have done better among white voters were Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Not coincidentally, they were also the only successful Democratic presidential candidates in the past four decades. Based on his current showing in the polls, Barack Obama may well be the next one. With whites expected to comprise less than 80 percent of the 2008 electorate, and with a 20-1 margin among black voters and a 2-1 margin among Hispanic voters, Obama's current nine point deficit among white voters would translate into a decisive victory in November.

Shocking, no... the numbers not lining up with the narrative pushed by a large segment of the punditry. Would it be better if Obama were able to secure a greater share of the White vote? Sure. But politics is about building coalitions, and there is no one single path to success that runs only through the support of White voters in America. Democrats can and repeatedly have secured pluralities and even majorities within the broader electorate even while carrying a minority of the White vote -- and, frankly, it seems more likely than not at this juncture that Obama will win in such a manner this year, too.

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Remember all of the talk about how Barack Obama had a unique difficulty attracting white voters to his camp? NBC News' First Read doesn't buy it. Combining the last two NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls to create one big sample (and thus larger subsamples with smaller margins of error), the folks at First Read note the following:

What's more on this front, we combined our last two NBC/WSJ surveys to get a larger sample of white voters broken down by age in the Obama-McCain match-up, and while Obama -- at this stage in the race -- outperforms Kerry and Gore among all white voters, the age group where Obama underperforms both Kerry and Gore is among white voters 65+. Obama trails McCain 54%-32%, which is nearly twice the deficit Kerry had at this point with Bush among this group (53%-40%). Obama, of course, does better among white voters under 35, which makes up for the older voter issue. [emphasis added]

Obama performs better than either of the last two Democratic nominees, one of whom one the popular vote, among white voters, but he is professed to have a problem with white voters? I think someone is going to have to explain this one to me...

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Crossposted at Ich Bin Ein Oberliner.

Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again ... ."
Here.

This has already been written about ad nauseam. But it isn't this quote in particular that bothers me: it's the sentiment behind it.

Also, it was the last straw.

More on the flip.

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