Obama's map keys on boost in black vote

WASHINGTON — As they ponder a political map that has spelled defeat for Democrats in the past two presidential elections, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign strategists are quietly laying plans to draw blacks to the polls in unprecedented numbers by capitalizing on the excitement over the prospect of electing the nation's first black president.

Obama strategists believe they have identified a gold mine of new and potentially decisive Democratic voters in at least five battleground states.

In Florida alone, more than half a million black registered voters stayed home in 2004. Hundreds of thousands more blacks are eligible to vote but are not registered. And campaign analysts have identified similar potential in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri and Ohio.

These five states were critical to the GOP's success in 2000 and 2004, but President Bush's victory margins were slim enough to suggest a major expansion of black turnout could help lead to Democratic gains this year.

John Bellows, a database expert in the Obama campaign, said he has identified "big pockets of potential voters" in key states. "There are pretty big numbers lying around to turn out," he said.

The strategy, however, requires a deft touch and carries risks. In large part, Obama, son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has successfully appealed across racial lines. Strategists acknowledge he cannot afford to appear to be exploiting race or running solely as a black candidate — particularly as he tries to court moderate whites and blue-collar workers who did not support him in the primaries.

"You've got to have a black strategy, but it has to be a biracial strategy," said Ronald Walters, a former strategist for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in the 1980s who has criticized Democratic candidates in the past for sidelining black voters by ceding the South to Republicans.

Not a simple formula

Obama's formula relies, in part, on his ability to demonstrate independence from the more militant traditions of black politics while using rhetoric that spans race. The Illinois senator, for example, has opposed monetary reparations for descendants of slaves. And he has said he does not think his daughters should benefit from affirmative action because they have had a "pretty good deal," while he has expressed openness to programs that could help disadvantaged whites, Hispanics and women.

That enables Obama's campaign to mobilize black voters while shielding him from being portrayed as a black candidate, supporters say.

Party strategists say Obama's competitive showing in primary contests proves the approach will work. In some primaries, notably North Carolina and Virginia, he showed strength among white voters, but his victory margins came from drawing blacks, including new black voters, to the polls in overwhelming numbers.

Despite massive get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004, just six in 10 black voters turned out. Obama's campaign says it can far surpass that this time.

David Bositis, an expert on black voting trends for the Joint Center on Political and Economic Studies, predicts turnout could rise by as much as 20 percent, and some Democratic strategists feel they can spur black turnout in the battleground states to as high as three in four registered voters.

"This year, we're going to be looking at record territory, and this will be a level of black turnout that's never been seen before," Bositis said.

The pursuit of black voters is part of the Obama campaign's broader strategy of targeting constituencies that have underperformed in past general elections but proved crucial to his victory over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in their battle for the nomination.

Another key target is voters of all races under 35, including college students and even high-schoolers who will be 18 by Election Day. In Virginia, for example, nearly 90,000 new voters 34 and younger have registered in recent months — and the Obama campaign is targeting many more who have not registered thus far. Florida strategists have identified about 600,000 young Democrats with "little or no voting history," according to an internal memo. The campaign is applying the same effort to reach unaffiliated Hispanics in New Mexico and Nevada.

Sophisticated techniques

What makes the idea of bringing in so many new voters more than just political fantasy is the Obama campaign's deep pockets and the sophisticated apparatus it has begun building — using techniques to ferret out and mobilize potential supporters that only a few years ago were the secret weapons of Republican strategists and their ideological allies.

Four years ago, it was Bush's campaign that used microtargeting to scope out sympathetic blacks, helping Bush win 16 percent of that vote in Ohio. Republican strategists say the black vote in Ohio gave Bush the cushion he needed to avoid a 2000-style recount battle there. This time, not only are more blacks expected to turn out, but Obama aides said he will win more than 90 percent of those who do.

In a political twist, Democrats can thank a Republican for empowering one new group of voters: ex-felons in Florida. Gov. Charlie Crist last week announced that, thanks to a new rule he enacted, about 115,000 felons who have completed their sentences had become eligible under his administration to register to vote. Liberal groups such as People for the American Way hope to track down even more who could have their rights restored in time to permit them to register and vote in November.

Experts say ex-felons are disproportionately black, and, if they can be found, more likely to be Obama backers. This provides a huge potential; an estimated 1.1 million felons and ex-felons in Florida were ineligible to vote in 2004, according to a 2006 book by sociologists Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. Here, too, the potential for gains is alloyed with risk: It could open the door for Republicans to revive the charge that Democrats are soft on crime.

Democratic strategists say that if the Obama campaign can reach even a fraction of blacks who have not voted in the past, it can cut dramatically into Bush's 2004 victory margins. According to a Democratic strategy memo in Florida, where Bush won by about 380,000 votes, "encouraging just one-third of the non-2004 voters to cast a vote would alone [make up] more than half the margin."