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.

America woke up Wednesday, looked into a giant mirror made up of millions of votes and saw how it has been changing for decades.

It wasn't just President Obama's re-election and the diverse coalition of minorities, women and youth that kept him in power.

For the first time, voters approved same-sex marriage in three states. Margaret Hoover, a Republican analyst and CNN contributor, called it "a watershed moment." Meanwhile, Wisconsin elected the country's first openly gay U.S. senator.

Two states legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

A record 20 women will be serving in the U.S. Senate.

And a record number of new Asian-American and Latino representatives were elected to Congress.

All this would have been unthinkable a generation ago, as would the idea the country would elect, let alone re-elect, its first black president.

Tuesday's election showed that the United States is redefining what it means to be an American, some political and social observers say: The country is less conservative than popular belief suggests. It's no longer the same America. The nation has arrived at a "new normal."

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There was an era in U.S. political life "that began with Ronald Reagan, where there was a conservative dominance powered by conservative voters and Southern whites," said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "That era is over."

Read more at CNN.

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.

President Obama won a second term last week, but it wasn’t a great week for other African-American candidates.

Despite Obama’s big win, there remain no black senators, only one African-American was even nominated for major statewide office, and black candidates lost seven of eight competitive House races — six of them by very close margins.

The end result: the number of African-Americans in the House will likely remain the same in 2013 as it was this Congress.

As of this weekend, three of the eight House races that had yet to be called featured black Republicans. All of them appear to have lost.

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David Bositis, an expert on African-American politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said despite the close losses, there is reason for hope.

“Most years, black candidates get either large votes — 75 percent-plus — or small votes –10-30 percent,” Bositis said. “This year, there were quite a few black candidates who lost but got between 45 and 50 percent of the vote, which is very respectable.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

"...In the final week of the campaign, both Fox News and MSNBC became even more extreme in how they differed from the rest of the press in coverage of the two candidates, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reported on Monday.

"On Fox News, the amount of negative coverage of [President] Obama increased -- from 47% in the first four weeks of October to 56% the final week. Meanwhile, positive discussion of [Mitt] Romney grew, from 34% of segments to 42%. On MSNBC, the positive coverage of Obama increased from 33% during most of October to 51% during the last week, while Romney's negative coverage increased from 57% to 68%."

The Center also said, "In the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama enjoyed his most positive run of news coverage in months . . . Only during the week of his nominating convention was the treatment in the press more favorable."

A series of screening questions in its poll of likely voters led the venerable Gallup polling organization to underestimate the turnout of blacks and Hispanics and thus miss President Obama's impending election victory this month, David Bositis, a senior research associate and pollster at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said on Saturday.

"They ask you how interested you are in the election, if you know where your polling place is, whether you've voted there, how often you vote, whether you'll vote on election day, how sure are you to vote, and whether you voted in 2008," Bositis told Journal-isms in a follow-up email on Monday.

Read more at The Root.

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.

On Tuesday, November 6, 2012,  the economy, unemployment, Big Bird, binders full of women and bayonets will take a backseat to the only poll that maters in electing a president and vice president – ballots cast in the polling booth.

Either way, history will be made on Election Day. Barack Obama will become the first Black president elected to a second term (as well as the first) or Mitt Romney will become the first Mormon elected president of the United States.

Obama is relying on his strong organizing ground game to propel him to victory, a strategy that relies heavily on Blacks, women, labor unions and youth. Romney is relying on high unemployment numbers and a sour economy to clear the path for a victory.

However, David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a progressive public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., doesn’t think that will be enough for the former Massachusetts governor.

 “A lot of White working class union employees, like in Ohio, know that [Romney] is anti-union,” Bositis said. “He opposed the bailout of the auto industry. He and the Republicans opposed extensions of unemployment benefits.”

Read more at The Greene County Democrat.

In Bibb County, Ala., on Tuesday, a Democrat named Walter Sansing was in a race for county commissioner against a Republican named Charles Beasley, who was on the ballot despite the inconvenience of having died several weeks earlier. Mr. Beasley won.

That is what kind of Election Day it was in the South. Elsewhere Republicans may be wailing and gnashing teeth, but in the mid- and Deep South states, they had yet another cycle of unchecked domination.

For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans took over the Arkansas legislature, and won the state’s last United States House of Representatives seat held by a Democrat. North Carolina elected a Republican governor and took over at least three Congressional seats. The last Democrat in a statewide office in Alabama was defeated. In most Southern states, the margins of victory for Mitt Romney were even larger than the lopsided margins for John McCain four years ago.

“It was kind of weird on Wednesday for Republicans here,” said Jason Tolbert, a conservative blogger and a columnist for The Arkansas News Bureau. His conclusion: “In Arkansas, we’re a right-of-center state in a nation that’s drifting further and further to the left.”

Despite the local victories, Republicans in the South are aware that many of the post-election analyses have found the party’s image problems to be in the approach and the appeals that have led to its near total victory here. Southern Republican politicians continue to cruise smoothly to victory on the votes of white, socially conservative evangelicals. While some leaders have succeeded with a more centrist platform, like Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a large part of the Southern electorate still rewards politicians who promise to crack down hard on criminals and illegal immigrants, assume a defiant tone when speaking about the federal government and dismiss the idea of gay rights out of hand.

Nationally, this approach has been putting up diminishing returns.

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“If the Republicans don’t adapt and the Democrats become the dominant party, the government is going to start imposing policies on the Southern states,” said David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at The New York Times.

Dr. David Bositis discusses the role of the African American vote in the 2012 presidential election and what the outcome means for minority communities at a forum on November 7, 2012.

This video can be found on C-SPAN.

The American people have decided that President Obama should be given another term in office to continue leading the nation toward economic recovery and expanded opportunity for all. Amid the rancor of the 2012 campaign, an electorate that was focused on the economy – and presented with two starkly different visions for fixing it – chose to support the President’s program aimed at balanced deficit reduction, job growth, health care reform and public investment in education, technology and infrastructure.

While Governor Romney fell short of creating a winning coalition, we commend him and his family for their spirited and enduring commitment to public service and to the very highest ideals of our nation during this hard fought campaign.  We hope and trust that his party will continue its quest to establish a vision and message that will resonate with people of all races and from all segments of society.
 

View the entire press release by clicking the link below.