Shades of blue tinge old South

What does last week's election say about us?

I cashed in some airline miles to attend a meeting of African-American columnists and commentators this week in Washington, D.C. We heard from researchers, campaign officials and pollsters, all looking to understand not the candidates but the electorate.

David Bositis said, "White Southern conservatives have been isolated by the election." Bositis is a senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Activities.

He said that while John McCain got 55 percent of the white vote versus 43 percent for Barack Obama nationally, a majority of white voters in 16 states and the District of Columbia voted for Obama. And Obama did better with white voters than John Kerry did in 2004, except in most of the Old Confederacy.

Demographics are splitting the old South. More Americans have college degrees than in the past, and the country is more diverse. Obama won Hispanics, Asian Americans, African Americans and the most educated Americans, especially young ones.

In Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana, Obama got a lower proportion of the white vote than Kerry did. The bad economy and low Bush numbers that propelled the Obama campaign elsewhere had no effect there.

But Virginia and North Carolina voted for Obama. Bositis said, "Virginia and North Carolina have seceded [from the South]."

That's because of the large numbers of people who've moved into those states from elsewhere and the higher level of education in those states, he said. In other words, thriving Southern states don't vote like their poor cousins.

The Hispanic vote turned Florida blue, and Bositis said Texas and Georgia are moving in that direction. So, he said, a small number of the states that have never accepted advances in civil rights are left outside the mainstream.

That doesn't mean civil-rights work is done, however.

Ron Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, said many people see that struggle as beginning and ending in the 1960s, but the fight for equality and justice started long before that and won't end until everyone is truly free.

Walters said the election didn't erase the many gaps that follow racial lines, and noted that Obama stayed clear of those issues during the campaign. "He would not have been able to raise a black agenda in this campaign."

Walters said black folks voted for Obama not because he made them any promises in exchange for their votes, but because of their "hope and trust" that he will be fair.

What the numbers show, what the broad coalition Obama put together shows, is that we have elected him to be president of all Americans. That's something new.

Jerry Large: jlarge@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3346