The headline reads "The White Stuff", with the subhead "A new NEWSWEEK Poll underscores Obama's racial challenge." This is their argument:
Even as he closes in on the Democratic nomination for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama is facing lingering problems winning the support of white voters--including some in his own party. In a new NEWSWEEK Poll of registered voters, Obama trails presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain 40 percent to 52 percent among whites.
Sounds bad, right? Except that when I looked up the exit polls from 2004, I found that Bush beat Kerry among white voters 58-41. So why is this disastrous for Obama? McCain is underperforming Bush among white voters, and it's certainly reasonable to think that Obama will not only match Kerry among African-American voters (88-11) but will pull even higher turnout in that group.
Now there are some obvious caveats--McCain is not Bush, though they're certainly very much alike in policy terms--and Bush was more popular in 2004 than he is now. But I'm guessing that those two factors do little more than balance each other out.
It's also true that Obama isn't Kerry, but based on Newsweek's polling numbers, Obama's only doing one point worse than Kerry did, and that's with 8% undecided--you'd have to think that Obama could pull at least even with Kerry in that demographic.
So what am I missing? How is Barack Obama having any more difficulty with white voters than John Kerry had in 2004?