…a return to pre-2008 African-American turnout levels wouldn’t necessarily doom a Hillary Clinton candidacy, but it would leave her with a whole lot less margin for error in a host of swing states. For example, in Virginia, what if the African-American share of the vote had been 18 percent instead of 20 percent in 2012? We estimate Obama would have won by 1.6 percent, rather than 3.9 percent. In Ohio, what if it had been 13 percent instead of 15 percent? We estimate Obama would have won by 0.8 percent, not 3.0 percent. In Pennsylvania, what if it had been 11 percent instead of 13 percent? Obama’s edge would have shrunk from 5.4 percent to 3.4 percent.
The surge of this solidly Democratic bloc has masked Democrats’ downturn with working-class whites, who gave Obama just 36 percent nationally in 2012. According to our calculations, if the African-American share of the electorate were to drop two points in 2016, Hillary Clinton would need to do about 1.5 percent better than Obama did among all white voters just to offset that decline – a realistic goal, but one that would require reversing the party’s current trajectory with whites.
Via RCP (lack of link deliberate, but not meant maliciously). In case you were wondering, dropping two points would put the African-American vote back to 2004 levels, which is another way of saying ‘Hillary Clinton will lose the election.’ Note, also, that all of this assumes that African-Americans will still vote amazingly-extremely-overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate in 2016. If they only vote extremely-overwhelmingly (as in, 89/10 instead of 93/6), that’s just more bad news for the Democrats.
The bottom line here is not so much that Hillary Clinton is doomed, although of course she is: it’s that the Democrats probably will not do any better with any other candidate. For a Democrat, everything has to work perfectly, and in order, and with no margin for error. Indeed, it’s much like 2008 was for us; so of course we nominated somebody that half the party couldn’t stand, simply because it was his turn and nobody else could really make any headway. How did that work out for us, again?
Moe Lane