In a piece for the Huffington Post, Earl Ofari Hutchinson breaks down the racial backdrop to the GOP candidate's presidential race.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, GOP political guru Karl Rove, and the parade of Hispanic and black speakers at the Republican National Convention either said or were testament to one belief and that's GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney can't win with just white votes. The rationale is simple he doesn't have enough of them. The supposed standard break point for GOP presidential candidates to bag the White House is they must get 60 percent or more of the 104 million white voters, who make up close to 75 percent of the nation's voters. In eleven major polls, Romney averages slightly more than 53 percent of white voters. The CNN poll is the most generous and gives him only 55 percent of the white vote.
Getting the supposed magic number of white votes in the GOP column is even more crucial given the crushing majority overall of Democrats to Republicans. There are 55 million registered Republicans and 72 million registered Democrats.
The surface bad news for Romney then is that if the percent of white votes that he now has doesn't change drastically before Nov. 6 he will be just another GOP presidential also-ran.
There are three problems with this. It focuses solely on raw numbers and raw percentages. It's not the number of white voters, but where they are that matter more than the overall numbers. The election will boil down to which candidate tops out in the must win swing states. The number and percentage of white votes that Romney gets in these states are far more important than a simplistic fixed percentage of overall white votes.
Read the rest of Earl Ofari Hutchinson's piece at the Huffington Post.
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