In the days immediately following the presidential election, Martin Mendez was in a blue funk.

A Latino Republican, he watched with dismay as poll after poll revealed that not only did President Barack Obama win a second term in office, but he did so with a sizable portion of the Hispanic vote.

The loss was especially painful for Mendez, who spent hours knocking on the doors of Hispanics around Denver in an effort to convince them to give the GOP a try.

"Out in the field in Denver, the comments I got ... the feedback was Mitt Romney's for the millionaires. We're these poor Hispanics, so we're going to vote for Obama because he's for the little guy," Mendez said, his voice full of exasperation.

"There is this class warfare game that Democrats play every single election cycle. We have to start now, reaching out now and not sit on the sidelines until the next cycle," he said.

The growing influence of Latinos, blacks, women and young people in America is not a new story. Demographers have known that at some point the country would become more non-white than white. Social scientists knew that the American landscape was changing, and that change would begin to have profound impact on the nation's shifting identity.

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Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters -- who, according to U.S. Census figures released earlier this year, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year -- will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.

The coming political revolution could result in a massive changing of the guard on nearly every level of government, potential cultural clashes from big cities to rural towns, and the type of political alliances that are now considered rare.

"I do think that the era that began with Ronald Regan where there was a conservative dominance powered by conservative voters and Southern whites. That era is over," said David Bositis, a senior political analyst, at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Any candidate that wants to run a campaign [now] only at whites is going to lose."

Read more at CNN.

The 2012 election was historic for more than just the reelection of the nation’s first black president.

“2012 will be the last campaign where one of the major parties seeks to get elected solely with the white vote,” David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies said Wednesday in a forum to discuss the impact of the black vote during this year’s campaign.

“2012 very clearly showed that the country is multiracial, multiethnic” and successful candidates in the future – especially Republican candidates – “have to appeal to a much wider group.”

Further, Bositis said, the black vote was crucial in the so-called swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, the latter of which votes are still being counted and Obama holds on to a narrow lead.

The percentage of black voter turnout in those states increased substantially, Bositis said. In Ohio, particularly, the percentage of black voters voting increased by 4 percentage points, from 11 to 15 percent of the total turnout, compared to 2008. And Obama won 96 percent of the black vote on Tuesday.

Read more at Black America Web.

Despite efforts in some states to suppress the Black vote and predictions that African-Americans would not turn out at the rate they did in 2008, Blacks overcame all obstacles and were key to Obama’s re-election to a second term, an analysis of voting data shows.

Exit polls show that 93 percent of Blacks voted for Obama this year, down slightly from the 95 percent rate in 2008. But voting for all groups was down this year compared with the presidential election four years ago.

Obama carried every age bracket by at least 90 percent, but there was a gender gap among African-Americans, with 96 percent of Black women voting to re-elect the nation’s first Black president and only 87 percent of men supporting Obama. Four years ago, there was only a one-point difference separating the two groups, with women giving Obama 96 percent of their vote, compared with 95 percent for Black men.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney received only 6 percent of the Black vote, which was 2 percent higher than John McCain in 2008 but less than 11 percent achieved by George Bush in 2004 when he defeated John Kerry.

“The African American vote was crucial for President Obama in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia,” said David Bositis senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Read more at Black Voice News.

When black voters gave President Barack Obama 93 percent support on Election Day in defiance of predictions that they might sit it out this year, black leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That encouraged those leaders to try to leverage more attention from both Obama and Congress. Although they waver over how much to demand from the president — particularly in light of defeated GOP challenger Mitt Romney's assertion that Obama gave "gifts" to minorities in exchange for their votes — they are delivering postelection wish lists to the president anyway.

"I think the president heard us loud and clear. The collective message was, 'Let's build on where we already are,'" the Rev. Al Sharpton told reporters after a White House meeting last week with a collection of advocates representing largely Democratic constituencies.

Specifically, Sharpton said, that means keeping the brunt of the looming "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts off the backs of the middle and working class.

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Nationally, Obama's share of the black vote was down slightly from four years ago. But in some key states, turnout was higher and had an impact, said David Bositis, an expert on black politics and voting at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Blacks made up 15 percent of the electorate in Ohio, up from 11 percent in 2008. And 97 percent of those votes went for Obama, leading Bositis to say Obama's margin of victory in the state came from black voters.

In Michigan, the black share of the vote grew from 12 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2012, according to exit polls.

"Michigan was one of the states the two parties jostled around, and eventually Republicans decided they were not going to win, and one of the reasons was the big increase in the black vote," Bositis said.

Read more at U.S. News and World Report.

When Americans go to the polls on Nov. 6, support for President Obama will remain virtually unchanged among Black voters, some experts predict.

“I think Black support for Obama would be the same,” according to David Bositis, senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on Black issues. He added, “In terms of turnout, 2008 was a record year. But if there’s going to be a difference this year, it’s going to be small.”

The prediction is puzzling to some given the dramatically different voting climates of 2008 and this year.

“There’s no comparison. The climate was much more uplifting in 2008,” Bositis said.

Back then, most Americans were willing to take a chance on a then-unknown candidate who sold them on his vision of hope and change. African Americans were buoyed by racial pride in the nation’s first viable Black candidate.

Read more at The Afro-American.

Before coming of age as a student at Hampton University, Carl Gray was a staunch, frequently lone defender of his conservative values. Ask him to recall a specific time where classmates or friends really challenged or debated him on his politics, he can’t remember one -- because a teacher or administrator always got in the way to defend liberal policies and the fellow students that believed them.

“That in itself was discouraging to know that teachers and professors wouldn't even allow for students to have their own discussions regarding political beliefs,” said Gray. “It was 'My way or the highway' in those classes. You either agree with the liberal philosophy or face the wrath. I often felt that I was being indoctrinated rather than taught. I actually learned more on my own, by reading both sides and making my own conclusion.”

Gray’s story is a common one on historically black college campuses around the country. As terms like "redistricting," "job creation" and "equal opportunity" hover around the culture of African Americans and their vote, a growing number of HBCU students and young alumni are supporting conservative values. It is a counter-cultural revolution in the face of traditional politics championed by black college students, but a throwback to the values that conservative HBCU students and alums say aren’t far from what black colleges have always promoted, and need for future progress.

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The increase of HBCU students and alums identifying as conservative or Republican is consistent with an uptick in black participation within the Republican Party overall.

In an August 2012 study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the number of black delegates participating in the Republican National Convention increased 20.5 percent from 2008, with 47 delegates comprising 2.1 percent of the total delegation and up from 39 delegates who appeared at the 2008 RNC Convention in Minneapolis.

According to The Joint Center, which has surveyed black Republican participation since 1984, conservative partisanship dropped from nearly 15 percent in 2004 to just over seven percent in the 2008 presidential election.


Read more at The Huffington Post.

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.”


Read more at Yahoo! News.

On a hip-hop radio station in northeast Ohio, a swing state where turnout among black voters may decide the presidential election, listeners are being exhorted to vote this year — not just for a candidate, but to send a message.

“There are forces at work that don’t want you to vote,” intones an ad produced by the station that mentions no parties or candidates, “and will do anything they can to make it difficult for you to vote. You’re stronger, you’re smarter than that.”

Those “forces,” in the eyes of many minority voters in Ohio and other battleground states, are Republican state legislators who have sought to limit early voting and impose voter identification requirements — moves widely seen as an effort to tamp down turnout by African-Americans.

In Ohio, that effort has mostly failed, with many new restrictions either overturned by the courts or hastily repealed by the Legislature itself in the face of popular uproar. But in the process, Republican legislators seem to have handed a powerful rallying cry to those seeking to maximize minority-voter turnout.

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“The fact that the Republicans are trying to keep black people from voting is only going to want to make them want to vote more,” said David A. Bositis, an analyst of minority voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

Read more at The Boston Globe.

Fresh from a controversial NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll which stated that Mitt Romney will receive 0% of the Black vote, the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies followed up with its own poll of the Republican National Convention Attendees.

The report discovered that there were  47 African Americans who were part of convention delegates at the 2012 Republican National Convention which just wrapped in Tampa, Florida. That number amounts to  2.1 percent of total delegates.

Although it seems like a stark miniscule amount, in actuality, it represents a jump in Black representation compared to the last convention.

Read more at Politic365.