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NEW FORCES
Obama Says His Nominat ion Would Swell Black Turnout
If he wins the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) can "redraw the political map," he told an audience in Concord, N.H., on Monday. "I guarantee you African American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum," he said. Obama made the comments in response to a question from a voter who said she wanted to support the Democrat most likely to win, the Associated Press reported. "Young people's percentage of the vote goes up 25 to 30 percent. So we're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ."
Offering one example, he said, "If we just got African Americans in Mississippi to vote their percentage of the population, Mississippi is suddenly a Democratic state."
The candidate has suggested in the past that African Americans will strongly back one of their own, much the same argument that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has made about women and former senator John Edwards about Southerners.
But data from the 2004 National Election Pool exit polls suggest Obama's assumptions might be off base. In Mississippi, black turnout was about 57 percent; overall turnout in the state was about 54 percent.
For Obama, increasing the black vote by at least 30 percent in some states would be very difficult, if not impossible. For example, a 30 percent increase in the number of black voters in Mississippi would require 74 percent of blacks to vote, virtually unprecedented in recent U.S. elections.
And even with such an increase, white voters' support for Republicans in the state is so broad -- 85 percent of white voters backed Bush in 2004 -- that if every other voting bloc remained the same and black voting jumped -- an unlikely scenario -- Obama would collect only about 45 percent of the vote in Mississippi, based on John Kerry's performance that year.
-- Perry Bacon Jr. and Jennifer Agiesta
A SHOT AT GIULIANI
I {heart} New York, But Hands Off My Gun
Fred Thompson says he enjoyed his time in New York, where he lived and worked while filming the hit television show "Law & Order."
