The demographics of America are changing and the demographics of America's voters are changing right along with them. In this excellent diary dreaminonempty looked at some of these changing demographics.
But presidential elections are decided, as we all know, by the states and, in particular, by the swing states. In this also excellent diary David Jarman showed how little change there has been in which states are "swing".
So swing below the Kos Croissant for more.
So I decided to look at some swing states that have sizable minority populations. The data I got from this Census site had "Black", "Hispanic" and "Asian" broken out in terms of reported voting. All three of those groups are massively Democratic.
The five states I chose all had at least 10% of the voters belonging to one of those three groups. They also were states that were close in at least one of the last two elections. They were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Virginia. Obviously, the 5 states have different large minority groups. That's one reason I combined them.
Arizona has 11 electoral votes; Florida 29, Georgia 16, Nevada 6 and Virginia 13. Combined that's 75 electoral votes. That's a big chunk.
And how do things look in those states, demographically? They look good. Really good. The Census site doesn't have 2012 data yet, so I looked at 6 elections: 2000 to 2010. I looked at presidential years separately from off years. Here's what I found
For POTUS years:
And for other years
Ahhh... those pretty upward sloping curves!
It's interesting (at least to me) that the slopes are somewhat stronger for the off-years. Arizona is flat for POTUS years (although I am pretty sure that will change when 2012 data become available) but shows a sharp increase in 2010. And the best predictor of voting next time is.... voting last time.