In 2004, Senator Reid got a majority of the white vote (58 percent) against a weak opponent (Richard Ziser). Senator Kerry, on the other hand, only got 43 percent of the white vote in Nevada. Given that whites were 77 percent of the 2004 electorate, Reid won (61 percent to 35 percent) and Kerry lost (48 - 51).

By improving performance and turnout among black and Latino voters, Barack Obama was able to overcome the fact that he, like Kerry, lost the white vote in Nevada (45 - 53). African-Americans were 10 percent of the Nevada electorate in 2008 compared to 7 percent in 2004, and Obama got 94 percent of the African-American vote compared to 86 percent for Kerry. Latinos went from 10 percent to 15 percent of the electorate and Obama received 76 percent of the Latino vote. My September 2008 polling for the Obama campaign showed that registered Latinos who had never voted before were his strongest supporters. The post-election poll I did for the Annenberg Public Policy Center drove home that the campaign delivered those voters.

A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll conducted late last summer highlights Senator Reid’s challenge. Against Sue Lowden, Reid was only getting 34 percent of the white vote - barely half the percentage of the white vote he got in 2004 and 9 points lower than Kerry got in his losing cause. The Kos poll also had Reid getting 58 percent of the black vote, 28 points lower than Kerry. Nate Silver correctly observes that “as someone whose best-case scenario probably involved cobbling together 51-53 percent of the electorate, turning off even a small fraction of black voters could be highly injurious.” Finally, the Kos poll had Reid getting 58 percent of the Latino vote - 2 points less than Kerry and 18 less than Obama.

Getting back to the high fifties with white voters is extremely unlikely; it will take the Reid campaign a lot of work to get to the 45 percent that Obama earned. Black voters may again be around 10 percent of the electorate but Reid wasn’t going to get in the nineties with African-American voters even prior to the release of his unfortunate comments about the president. To get enough voters to win, Reid needs to get back to the polls the many Latinos for whom November 2008 was the first election in which they had ever voted.

[Update 1/13/2010] A recently completed poll has Reid at 36 percent of all voters.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Blog, Election 2010, My Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.