It’s easy to understand why some Republicans and pollsters dismissed the idea that the Obama coalition from 2008 would be fired up and ready to go in 2012. Not possible. Not with the unemployment rate at 14.3 percent among blacks, 10 percent among Hispanics, and 11.8 percent among adults under 30.

Yet, fired up or just trudging to the polls, those groups were among President Obama’s principal bulwarks against defeat in decisive states. In some cases they made up a greater share of the national electorate than they did in 2008. The outcome confounded some conservatives and surprised even some pollsters.

African-Americans, for instance, made up 13 percent of the national electorate in the historic 2008 election. This week, after years of a down economy, months of a dispiriting campaign, and long-running rumblings about whether Obama has neglected the black community, distanced himself from it, or taken it for granted, they were still at 13 percent of the electorate.

“Black voters were absolutely not going to let Obama lose if they could help it,” said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. They proved particularly useful to Obama in swing states. Black voters went from a 12-percent share of the electorate in Michigan in 2008 to 16 percent this week, exit polls showed, and from 11 percent to 15 percent in Ohio. Under-30 voters accounted for 19 percent of the national electorate, up from 18 percent. Hispanics, meanwhile, rose from 9 percent to 10 percent.

Read more at the National Journal.

For many African Americans, this election was not just about holding on to history, but also confronting what they perceived as a shadowy campaign to suppress the black vote.

Black voters responded with a historic turnout here in Ohio and strong showings across a range of battleground states, according to exit poll results. Buoyed by a sophisticated ground operation by the Obama campaign, African Americans helped provide the edge in Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and perhaps Florida, which remained too close to call Wednesday. Their support narrowed President Obama's losing margin in North Carolina.

"This is a man who is fighting for the opportunity for all people to reach the American dream," said retired Marine Andre Baird, 55, as champagne dripped down his bald head at an Obama victory party in Cleveland on Tuesday night. "These hands," Baird added, his right hand clenching into a fist, "have knocked on at least a thousand doors!"

---

African American voters had more concrete relationships with Obama in this election and had benefited from his first term, said David Bositis, a researcher with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Obama's health-care overhaul, in particular, offered a disproportionate benefit to African Americans, 36 percent of whom previously lacked health coverage, as opposed to whites, 12 percent of whom lacked coverage, he said.

In North Carolina, the African American vote held at 23 percent, the same level as 2008, even as the pull of making history faded.

Read more at The Independent.

The strong showing from blacks and Hispanics at the polls on Tuesday that helped re-elect President Barack Obama and boosted several Democrats into office across the country will force the Republican Party to change its strategy in the future, says Dr. David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

“This was not simply a re-election, but 2012 will be the last campaign where one of the major parties seeks to get elected, solely with the white vote,” Bositis said during a briefing today on the Role of African American voters. “A successful political movement will have to appeal to a broader swath other than non-Hispanic white people.”

The 2012 election was a clear showing that America is now multi-racial, multi ethnic country, he said.

According to the Joint Center, when Democrat John Kerry faced George W. Bush in 2004, 79 percent of American electorate was non-Hispanic white. By 2008, that percentage had dropped to 74 and this year, it was 72 percent.

At the same time, the share of African American voters and the share of Hispanic voters increased.

The share of African American voters has grown from 11 to 13 percent, while the share of Hispanic voters has grown from 6 to 10 percent, Bositis said.

Read more at Black America Web.

The Grand Old Party is still asking why and engaging in Presidential Election post mortem after their candidate Governor Mitt Romney lost the election. Over the weekend some Republicans began blaming a possible loss of momentum on Superstorm Sandy. Since Wednesday morning, they are simply pointing fingers. For many the answer is clear; the GOP walked away from their prior umbrella approach to include the nation’s minority populations.

The Party walked away from something former RNC Chairman Michael Steele made a priority while leading the RNC. Steele included outreach to those in “Harlem” and to those in “Little Havana” as well as other minority communities.

President Obama, prior to the election, told White House reporters Romney would “lose” because he did not reach out to the Latino population.

David Bositis, Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, contends “One of the big stories of this campaign is how much Hispanics were alienated by the Republican Party.” Stories on the black vote are not as newsy. Bositis contends, “African Americans were already alienated before the campaign started.” Translation from the media mindset; that was nothing new.

Read more at AprilDRyan.com.

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.

---

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.

Maybe it's just math, but it may also be a great political accomplishment.

President Obama has put together a coalition that's not only been a winner for him, but promises to pay dividends to his party for years to come.

A mix of minorities, young people and educated white professionals has now driven him to two majority-vote presidential victories — the first Democrat to pull that off since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"What historians and political scientists will focus on is that he changed the coalition of the Democratic Party," says Villanova University political scientist Lara Brown. "The new coalition is groups with ascendant demographics — new minorities and young people."

As has been widely noted this week, Obama managed to recapture broad support from groups largely responsible for his 2008 election: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, single women, and young and highly educated whites.

Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the overall white vote, according to exit polling. With whites shrinking as a share of the electorate — and Republicans struggling to appeal to minorities — it wasn't enough.

---

Obama has shown the party it can not only win but dominate the Electoral College with very little support in the South, outside states such as Virginia and Florida that are conducive to his coalition.

But there's no guarantee that other Democrats will be able to draw on the same sources of support. African-Americans and young people did not turn out in force in 2010, which was one big reason Republicans enjoyed big victories at the congressional and state levels that year.

"I wouldn't say that other Democrats could automatically count on it," says David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that studies minority affairs.

But, Bositis notes, there are other prominent Democrats who should be able to appeal to the same sort of constituencies that propelled Obama to victory.

Read more at NPR.

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.

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.

---

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.

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.

---

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.