By Manning Marable

The 2008 election of Barack Obama to the Presidency inspired media and academic speculation that Americans had achieved a “post-racial society.” Superficially, the electoral triumph of an African-American candidate in several states of the former confederacy, such as Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, seemed to represent a racial breakthrough.

But a closer analysis of voting behavior by racial groups—whites, African Americans, Latinos, and others—over the past thirty years tells a different story. It is not that the vast majority of the white electorate radically transformed its negative opinions about black officer seekers; it is the major demographic shifts in the U.S. population, moving us toward a “majority-minority nation,” that explains the rise and success of Obama and candidates like him.

For decades, prior to the early 1990s, there had been one ironclad rule in American racial politics: that the majority of white voters in any legislative, municipal, or Congressional district, would not vote for an African-American candidate, regardless of her or his ideology or partisan affiliation. There was an omnipresent glass ceiling in electoral politics limiting the rise of all black elected officials. Blacks could be elected to Congress or as mayors of major cities only if districts held high concentrations of minority voters.

In the 1980s, progressive black candidates such as Harold Washington sought to circumvent this racial barrier by constructing multiracial coalitions as the base of their electoral mobilizations, reaching out to traditional liberal constituencies. Other more conservative African-American leaders, such as Thomas Bradley, who had been elected mayor of Los Angeles on his second try in 1972, and Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode in the 1980s, won whites’ support by deliberately downplaying their own ethnic affiliations and racial identities. They espoused a pragmatic, non-ideological politics that catered to local corporate interests and promoted urban concessions, but even these moderate black officials could not depend on the electoral support of many whites, even in their own parties.

Political scientists first began observing the lack of reliability of pre-election polls for whites in races involving African-American candidates nearly three decades ago. In the 1982 California gubernatorial election, pre-election polls indicated that Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley would easily defeat Republican challenger George Deukmejian. After Bradley narrowly lost to Deukmejian, it became evident that a significant percentage of whites who had been predicted to support Bradley had voted for the Republican.

This so-called “Bradley effect” was subsequently documented in dozens of elections. For example, in 1989, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, announced his candidacy for the state’s governorship. In many ways Wilder ran a campaign similar to that of Obama, two decades later. Wilder focused on issues largely devoid of racial overtones, such as economic development, the environment and public health. Opinion polls in the state showed Wilder maintaining a double-digit lead over a lackluster Republican candidate, Marshall Coleman. In Virginia’s gubernatorial election, which Wilder managed to win, but by less than one-half of one percent of the total vote, white voters overwhelmingly had favored Coleman.

Even more significantly, pollsters found that many white Virginians deliberately provided false information when revealing their voting intentions in polls. When whites were questioned about their gubernatorial preferences by a white pollster, Coleman defeated Wilder by 16 percent. But when black pollsters were used for interviews, whites favored Wilder by 10 percent over Coleman. Both the inconsistent pre-election polling information by whites, and the actual election returns appear to validate the “Bradley effect.”

By the twenty-first century, hundreds of race-neutral, pragmatic black officials had emerged, winning positions on city councils, state legislatures and in the House of Representatives. Frequently they distanced themselves from traditional liberal constituencies such as unions, promoted gentrification and corporate investment in poor urban neighborhoods, and favored funding charter schools as an alternative to the failures of public school systems.

A growing share of these new leaders were elected from predominately white districts. In 2001, for example, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, roughly 16 percent of the nation’s African-American state legislators had won election in predominantly white districts. By 2008, out of 622 black state legislators nationally, 30 percent represented predominantly white constituencies. Between 1998 and 2008, about two hundred African Americans defeated whites for municipal and state legislative races, even in some states, such as Iowa, Minnesota and New Hampshire, where black populations are small. In November 2006, civil rights attorney Deval Patrick, employing campaign strategies drawn from Barack Obama’s successful 2004 Senate bid, easily won the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts, a state with a 79 percent white population.

Ideologically, this new leadership group reflected a range of divergent views on social policy. The most prominent “moderates” within this cohort included: former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, who is currently leader of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council; and Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker. More ideologically “liberal” leaders in this group are: Barack Obama; and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

This is not to suggest that these politicians possess no strong ethnic roots or identity. All of these individuals are proudly self-identified as African Americans. But strategically, none of them pursue what could be called race-based politics. None favor or would support a Black Agenda similar to that espoused by the March, 1972, Gary, Indiana Black Political Convention. Most probably would perceive even Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s as too narrowly race- and ethnically-based, and too far to the left on economic policy.

Obama undoubtedly took most of these factors into account – the possibility of a “Bradley/Wilder effect” on whites’ support of black candidates, African-American grievances surrounding the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, the recent debacle of the Katrina Crisis, and the rise of the post-racial politics of a new generation of black leaders – to construct his own image and political narrative essential for a presidential campaign.

Early on in their deliberation process, the Obama pre-campaign group recognized that most white Americans would never vote for a black Presidential candidate. However, they were convinced that most whites would embrace, and vote for, a remarkable, qualified Presidential candidate who happened to be black. “Race” could be muted into an adjective, a qualifier of minimal consequence. So ethnically, Obama did not deny the reality of his African heritage; it was blended into the multicultural narrative of his uniquely “American story,” which also featured white grandparents from Kansas, a white mother who studied anthropology in Hawaii, and an Indonesian stepfather.

Unlike black conservatives, Obama openly acknowledged his personal debt to the sacrifices made by martyrs and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet he also spoke frequently about the need to move beyond the divisions of the sixties, to seek common ground, and a post-partisan politics of hope and reconciliation. As the Obama campaign took shape in late 2006 – early 2007, the basic strategic line about “race,” therefore, was to deny its enduring presence or relevance to contemporary politics. Volunteers often chanted, in Hari Krishna-fashion, “Race Doesn’t Matter! Race Doesn’t Matter!” as if to ward off the evil spirits of America’s troubled past.

In the Presidential election of 2012, the racial calculus is clear. Obama does not need a numerical majority of whites’ votes to win a second term. The Bureau of the Census has already noted that the overall white U.S. population will start declining after 2016, and nonwhites and Latinos will comprise a majority by 2042. Obama should need only about 42 percent of the white vote to win, provided that he receives the overwhelming support of blacks, two-thirds of Latinos and Jews, and 60 to 65 percent among Americans under 35 years old.

The classical Republican response to this would be to “divide and conquer,” manipulating racial stereotypes (like “Willie Horton” in the 1988 presidential race). But with the major changes in America’s demographic reality it will be difficult for conservatives to pander to racial prejudice. Obama is only the first of many black and Latino leaders who will successfully emerge at the national level. The major unanswered question is whether their individual achievement can be translated into greater upward mobility, and group empowerment, for black Americans and other minorities.

Manning Marable is a professor of history and political science and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University and a prolific author whose works include Beyond Black and White: Race in America’s Past, Present and Future, The Crisis of Color and Democracy, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life, and others.