When then-candidate Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, a lot of the credit went to the eye-popping 76 percent turnout rate among African-American voters.

Virginia, too, saw its large share of black voters help put Mr. Obama over the top in a state that hadn’t supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson. The results revived Democrats’ hopes for a new Southern strategy and for a new coalition between traditional black voters and progressive newcomers to the growing knowledge economies of northern Virginia and the Raleigh-Greensboro-Charlotte triangle.

But in these two Southern swing states, some polling and anecdotal evidence is giving rise to Democratic concerns that African-American enthusiasm for President Obama has slipped as a result of stubborn economic despair, deteriorating inner city conditions, a sense among voters that Obama no longer needs the black vote to win, and disagreements over social issues, including the president’s embrace of same-sex marriage. Heightening those concerns is the recognition by campaign strategists and analysts that, to win reelection, Obama likely needs to get close to the 65 percent of black voters who turned out in 2008 to vote in 2012.

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Black support for Obama could be seen in a California snap poll taken by SurveyUSA shortly after Wednesday’s first presidential debate, in which everybody surveyed but African-Americans thought Mitt Romney won.

Moreover, in this election, voting for Obama is less about racial pride and more about policy – particularly that Republican policies hold fewer specific rewards or distinct promises for the black community, suggests David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, in an interview with the Tennesseean newspaper in Nashville.

“African-Americans are still facing a lot of hardships,” he told the paper. “But Republicans are offering nothing more than the same of what they had under George Bush, and what they had under George Bush was hard times – with no promise of things getting better.”


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