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By BRIAN A. HOWEY
INDIANAPOLIS - Maybe it was that summer Saturday when Barack and Michelle Obama hosted a picnic in Noblesville that it began to sink in: this guy might just carry Indiana. Noblesville is about as Republican entrenched as you can find 
across America.
And maybe it was that post-election factoid that completed the thought: Obama carried Elwood, long a Democratic bastion but with a racial intolerant streak as some of my Peru High School classmates experienced decades ago. In 2004, President Bush easily won Elwood. “Everyone is fed up with the Republicans and the way Bush has done things,” Steve Richards, a Democrat organizer in Elwood, told the Anderson Herald-Bulletin. “It’s not 1970 any more.”
Indeed it isn’t.
For years to come the academics will be studying how Barack Obama became the first Democrat in 44 years to win Indiana. But there are some obvious reasons why he did that can be found in exit poll data compiled by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool.
Barack Obama opened his Indiana campaign on March 15 at Plainfield High School in Republican Hendricks County. It was the first of 49 visits he would make to Indiana in 2008. (HPI Photo by Ryan Nees)
Obama invested heavily in Indiana and won a 1 percent victory over John McCain. He opened 44 offices, made 49 trips including the last of his campaign on Election Day, and built a rapport in Republican counties. The strategy delivered with Republican strongholds like Noble County giving Obama 42 percent (30 percent for John Kerry in 2004), LaGrange 39 percent (28 percent in 2004), Steuben 45 percent (33 percent in 2004), Kosciusko 29 percent (21 percent in 2004). In the largest Republican county — Hamilton, where Obama opened offices in Noblesville and Fishers - he took 38 percent. That’s up from John Kerry’s 25 percent in 2004.
So while the Democrat rolled up big pluralities in Lake and Marion counties where everyone expected him to do so, he forged his 26,000-vote plurality by shaving away votes in some of the most Republican strongholds in America. He took 13 percent of the GOP vote. This went well beyond simple electoral strategy of “spreading the map” as campaign manager David Plouffe described it. From the earliest incarnation of the Obama candidacy, the Illinois Democrat knew that if he couldn’t build a rapport in red states, he would never be able to effectively govern. That’s why we saw Obama campaign offices in places like Noblesville and Goshen.
Obama made demographic inroads. In 2006, with Hoosier Republican congressmen John Hostettler, Mike Sodrel and Chris Chocola taking aim on the immigration issue with harsh rhetoric, Obama carried 77 percent of Hoosier Hispanics (and 67 percent nationally). In 2004, this group was hard to measure statistically, but it has grown from 3 to 4 percent in just four years.
Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said that the Republicans “have to be spooked” about the Hispanic voter who helped President Bush to two terms. Should the Hispanic vote continue to head into the Democratic column, it will be the dominant party.
Then there were the evangelicals. According to David Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, Obama carried 32 percent of young evangelical voters, compared to 16 percent for John Kerry in 2004. “That’s one in three of young evangelicals who voted for Obama. If there is a change, we’ve begun to see whispers of it in the 2008 election.” And Catholics? “Four in 10 Catholics are Latinos,” Campbell said. “Latinos are the face of the Catholic population going forward. Latinos swung to Obama.”
Indiana Democratic Chairman Dan Parker pointed to three statistics that boosted Obama: in 2004 President Bush had a 61 percent approval rating with Hoosiers; in 2008 it stood at 32 percent (according to the exit polls, Obama won 86 percent among those who strongly disapproved of Bush). In 2004, 47 percent said the economy was doing well; in 2008 it was 9 percent. The party breakdown in 2004 stood 46 percent Republican and 32 percent Democrat or a +14. In 2008 it stood at 41 percent Republican and 36 percent Democrat.
“Those three numbers really tell the story,” Parker said. In 2004, 17 percent said the economy was the main issue while “moral values” was No. 1. In 2008, 60 percent said the economy was the top issue “and 52 percent went to Obama.”
In 2004, the 18-29 year olds made up 14 percent of the Hoosier electorate and Bush carried that group 52 -47 percent. In 2008, that age group shot up to 19 percent and Obama carried them 63-35 percent. Suburban voters made up 45 percent of the electorate and Obama lost there by 9 percent. In 2004, John Kerry lost by 30 percent. “That’s some significant switch,” Parker said.
In the October 23-24 Howey/Gauge Poll, Obama was polling 38 percent of the Hoosier white vote and my analysis at the time was if that number nudged into the low 40s, Obama would probably win the state. He ended up with 45 percent.
Obama clearly inspires many Hoosiers. A record 2.8 million turned out and a quarter of those voted early, another successful Obama campaign tactic. Obama built on a foundation that was established in his tiny primary defeat to Hillary Clinton.
It was, simply, an audacious victory.
Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com
Tags: Barack Obama, Brian Howey, George W. Bush, John Kerry
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This entry was written by and posted on November 30, 2008 at 7:12 pm and filed under Brian Howey Column. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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