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Our expert says African-Americans will rally around the President come election time.

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Photo: Associated Press AP/Alex Brandon

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Illustration: Patrick McQuade

He has demographics on his side.

One of the most fascinating statistics from the last election was this: If the country’s demographics had been the same as they were in 1972, and every group had voted in the same percentages, John McCain would have won. George W. Bush’s Electoral College victory was the last stand of the Republicans’ white, small-town and suburban coalition. Obama represented the rise of an urban, multicultural nation. In the last four years, America has come to look even more like the President, and the 2010 Census found an America less white than at any time in its history.

Latinos, who went 3–1 for Obama in 2008, are a rapidly growing ethnic group in the swing states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Nevada and Virginia. Republicans have offended many of them by passing anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama.

“It’s not a question on whether or not he will receive the majority of the Hispanic vote,” says U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez. “But, it is the quantity: how many of them will actually take time out to go and vote. We’re talking about the level of enthusiasm and energy, and we still have time to generate that, but he needs to do things on the policy level and on the advocacy level.” Gutierrez cites Alabama’s anti-immigration legislation as a major issue. To get Hispanics to rally around him, Obama needs to block this legislation, “not just to say the Alabama law is flawed, not just to say it’s a violation of people’s basic civil rights.”

Obama also won 96 percent of the African-American vote in 2008. Al Kindle, a South Side political operator and owner of Purfect Elections, Inc., who began working with Obama during his 2000 congressional campaign, says African-Americans will rally around their first President. Republican attacks on Obama, Kindle says, are seen as an attack on the entire community.

“They will never match the intensity of 2008,” Kindle says. “There will never be as large a volunteer turnout. It was no different than when we elected Harold Washington. We did what we needed to do. We may not be there at every rally, but we’ll be there on the most important day.”

Obama can also count on Jewish support, though it’s slipped since 2009, according to a September Gallup poll (his support among Jews is still 13 points higher than the nation at large). “The President has consistently demonstrated his support for what American Jews believe in,” says Alan Solow, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “which is a two-state solution with the Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and with security with an independent Palestinian state.”