African-American Voters Put Barack Obama in the White House

At JBHE we have been doing some calculations on the importance of the black vote in the 2008 presidential election. If Obama kept all the Hispanic vote that he won but lost all of the black vote that he won, Obama would have lost Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

This would have shifted 107 electoral votes to John McCain. This would have resulted in a 280-258 victory for McCain in the Electoral College.

Clearly, African-American voters were responsible for electing the nation’s first black president.