Why Obama won: Hispanics, millenials were the difference

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Joel Kotkin, Forbes Contributor

President Obama won re-election primarily because he did so well with two key, and expanding, constituencies: Hispanics and members of the Millennial Generation. Throughout the campaign, Democratic pundits predicted that these two groups would be the key difference makers. They were right.

Let’s start with Hispanics, arguably the biggest deciders in this election. Exit polling shows Obama winning this group — which gave up to two-fifths of their vote to George Bush — by over two to one. In 2008, Obama improved his winning margin with Latino voters from 67% in 2008 to 69% in 2012. And for the first time they represented 10% of the overall electorate.

Obama and the Democrats went after this constituency hard, taking some risks along the way of sparking a backlash among whites. Obama’s move to not deport young illegals if they came to this country as a child and met certain other criteria blurred any negative impact from a still weak economy. In contrast, Romney’s platform of more or less making life so horrible that illegals leave canceled out all of the GOP candidate’s credible economic and social proposals that might have appealed to this group.


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