THERE is a remarkable racial story at the heart of Barack Obama`s historic election. But it may not be quite the one that you imagine. So, before the 2008 presidential election becomes forever defined as America`s cathartic act of collective redemption on race — which of course to some degree it also was — we should understand some facts and realities about what happened on Tuesday.

Barack Obama is America`s first post-racial president? Only up to a point. Obama won because he was the Democratic candidate who was also black. The risk that a black candidate might let that victory slip — the case made by Hillary Clinton during the primaries — was widely shared but gloriously disproved because Obama ran a campaign in which he never made his race the issue.
Obama played race the same way that Tiger Woods plays it. But race still shaped the contours of the voting patterns. Whites still voted Republican rather than Democrat on Tuesday — just as they have done in all recent presidential elections — dividing 55 per cent to 43 per cent in favour of John McCain. That`s not as big a gulf as in 2004 or in some earlier contests — which partly explains why Obama did well overall — but it is pretty much the same gap as in the racially charged 2000 contest, when whites voted for George Bush over Al Gore by 54 per cent to 42 per cent. Since the 2000 election took place in the economic sunshine and this one occurred during an economic chill, it looks as if these instincts endure in good times or bad.

Black people voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic nominee on Tuesday. No change there then. Ninety per cent of African-Americans voted for Gore, and 88 per cent for Kerry four years ago. Obama pushed that percentage up to 95 per cent, and there was a bigger black turnout this time too, all of which made a big difference to his cause in states like Indiana. But this was not a qualitative shift large enough to explain the overall result in 2008.

The big racial game-changer in the voting patterns was not among white or black either. It was among the Hispanic vote. Four years ago, Kerry beat Bush by nine points among Hispanic voters. This year, however, Obama beat McCain by 34 points — taking 66 per cent of these votes compared with McCain`s 32 per cent. That is not merely a huge 12-point swing that helped Obama capture Florida and a clutch of states in the south-west in which the Hispanic vote is concentrated.
It also sends a signal about the future — about the possibility of a future Democratic win in Arizona (which Bill Clinton carried in 1996) and even in Texas, as well as about the strength of the Democratic hold on California. It is a signal about the kind of American political map that will take shape later in the 21st century, as Hispanic voters come to outnumber all others. It is very bad long-term news for the Republicans, whose immigration policies are costing them dear.

There is good news to be found for those who believe that America may be changing on race in smaller subsections of the white vote. Young white voters, unlike their elders, went heavily for Obama. Hope for the future there, perhaps. Poorer whites, always more likely to vote Democrat, were more likely to vote for Obama than richer ones. More college graduates voted Democrat than non-graduates. Jews and other non-Christian religious white voters went heavily for Obama but white Christians overwhelmingly went for McCain. White evangelicals voted McCain by three to one. In America, the white churches are too often racial division`s best friends.

None of this is to belittle in any way what Obama`s victory means to black Americans. The scenes in Harlem on Tuesday were glorious. Ditto those in Washington DC, which voted 93 per cent in favour of Obama, where the noisy partying went deep into the small hours. It was no surprise that Oprah Winfrey, a key figure in paving the way for Obama, cried in Chicago. What was more surprising was that Condoleezza Rice declared her pride in his achievement too. Colin Powell spoke for millions — white as well as black — when he said “Look what we did”. Even George Bush seemed to get this bit of it.

But did Obama`s candidacy really reach across the old divides to the parts of America that the other Democrats could not? In some ways, principally because of the Hispanic swing, yes it did. In other ways, though, one should be careful not to assign too much unique electoral magic to Obama. Certainly he did marvellously well in the two states, Florida and Ohio, that have been electoral graveyards for Democratic party hopes in the past two elections.

And he comprehensively saw off McCain`s fight-to-the-finish effort in Pennsylvania. But would Hillary Clinton have done any worse in these states in these conditions? Tuesday`s exit polls suggest that Clinton would have beaten McCain by a slightly bigger margin than Obama did. n
— The Guardian, London