The Baltimore Sun reported on the large viewership of the debates in Baltimore yesterday. The Sun noted high engagement in markets with large African American populations.
Baltimore ranked third in viewership for the first debate, first for the vice presidential showdown and third for the most recent presidential debate - far outpacing even the nation's steeped-in-politics capital 40 miles down the parkway. That's a marked change from the 2004 race, when Baltimore did not finish in the top 10 TV markets for any debate.
In other markets where black households make up more than one-quarter of all TV homes, viewership for the recent debates was also among the strongest in the country - in metro areas including Memphis, Tenn.; Raleigh- Durham, N.C.; and Norfolk and the Richmond, Va., area.
This story ran before last night's debate. The Nielsen numbers for last night's debate are out for the top 56 metered-markets. And based on the top markets reported, African American engagement remains extremely high...
source: total TV households
source: African American TV households
source: 3rd debate metered-market ratings
African American households represent 13.1% of the total households in the top 56 metered-markets as measured by Neilsen. As you can see, the top half of the ratings for the debate are dominated by markets where the AA household rank is higher than the market's overall population rank.
Could Obama's August prediction be coming true?
"I'm probably the only candidate who having won the nomination can actually redraw the political map," Obama told an audience in Concord, New Hampshire on Monday. "I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum." Obama made the comments in response to a question from a voter who said she wanted to support the Democrat most likely to win, according to the Associated Press. "Young people's percentage of the vote goes up 25-30 percent. So we're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ."
The swing states of VA, FL, and MO are well represented in the top 10 list for debate ratings. And could there be a surprise for us in TN?
Just maybe the success of the Obama campaign ramping up registration in black communities is being telegraphed by the debate ratings. Ben Smith over a Politico recently wrote about Obama's quiet but powerful registration efforts within the community.
"We've never seen action like this when it comes to our targeted group, probably since 1984 or 88 when Jesse [Jackson] made his first runs," said King Salim Khalfani, the executive director of the Virginia State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "We didn't see numbers like this even with '04. We had lots of money in 2000 when we had our voter fund, but this year the excitement has been overwhelming through all sectors and classes."
In Georgia, for instance, the percentage of registered voters who are black has increased almost two points since 2004, to 29 percent, according to the Secretary of State's office. And, with early voting underway in the state, African-Americans are participating at vastly disproportionate numbers, casting nearly 40 percent of the early ballots, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In North Carolina, for instance, 30 percent of a record-breaking surge of new voters announced recently were African-American voters; blacks make up just 22 percent of the state's population. In Virginia, registration isn't measured by race, but new registrants were concentrated in heavily African-American and Democratic counties, like the city of Richmond.
Not only are we seeing high levels of engagement with the debates, but we are beginning to see the fruit of all of these registration efforts. And it looks like those newly registered voters will turn out to vote.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes that MO experienced record registration and expects record turnout:
New registrations have swamped election authorities, so final numbers still are being tallied. But in Missouri, where registration closed last week, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan expects that more than 4 million of the state's 5.8 million eligible citizens will have registered to vote.
How many registered voters actually will go to the polls? In Missouri, Ms. Carnahan says turnout may exceed 80 percent. That suggests a flood of 3.2 million voters — 500,000 more than voted in the 2004 presidential election.
There is a piece over at Salon by Mike Madden about vigorous early voting. While the National Association of Secretaries of State expect over 30% of ballots cast nationwide will come from early voting, the early voting totals in swing states appear set to go through the roof.
In some battleground states, such as New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida, that number could be even higher -- up to 50 percent or more, aides to Obama and to John McCain said. On the first day of early voting in North Carolina, early-vote locations were swamped. (One library in Charlotte reported waits of up to two hours.) New Mexico Democratic Party chairman Brian Colón expects close to half the electorate to have voted by Election Day. In Georgia, where Obama's campaign is apparently considering trying to compete again, more than half a million people have already voted; 210,000 of them were African-American, an encouraging sign to Democrats. Operatives in both campaigns expect a spike in early voting as it begins in states that allow it, then for it to subside for a little while, then spike again as the deadline approaches.
In Georgia, voters have waited hours to cast ballots in the last few weeks. In North Carolina on Thursday, wait times ranged from 15 or 20 minutes to a few hours. "Our lines went throughout the building," said Sarah Poole, a spokeswoman for the public library system in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C., where polling places have been set up in several branches. "It's nothing like it was four years ago."
So, could higher viewer engagement in TN markets be a potential sign of strength of the Obama strategy rather than another sign of weakness for McCain? Pollster.com currently has TN as McCain+17, but the AP reports:
Early voting in Tennessee got off to a strong start that brought out nearly three times as many voters in Memphis and almost twice as many in Nashville compared to 2004, officials said Thursday.
Opening day crowds Wednesday nearly doubled Nashville's previous first-day voting record of about 8,000, set in 2004.
A heavy early turnout in the state's two largest cities was seen by political observers as favoring Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain in the presidential election.
It may be just a pipe dream, but wouldn't TN look nice in a shade of blue.
As Gallup has recently admitted, the high interest in this campaign has dramatically altered its likely voter model. Between their tracking poll and their USA Today poll, Gallup is reporting up to six different scenarios.
The electoral college map looks strong for Obama, in no small part to the the groundwork laid by his campaign. This may have devastating consequences for Republicans in the down-ticket races. The media may focus on the economy as the driving force in the election, but the final make-up of Congress will have been shaped by the hard work of the Obama campaign.
UPDATE H/T to Joe Garcia (help Joe defeat Mario Diaz-Balart in FL-25). From the LA Times:
On Thursday, Miami-Dade County disclosed that Democrats had added more than 94,000 new voters to the rolls since January, compared with about 21,000 new Republicans. Democrats' gain came partly from the Obama campaign's major voter registration efforts here. The party has also made large gains statewide, though final numbers are not yet known.
Now the Obama campaign believes that it can win Florida -- and, therefore, a majority in the Electoral College -- by turning these voter registration gains into actual votes. In addition, the campaign has identified more than half a million African Americans and hundreds of thousands of young people statewide who were already registered but did not vote four years ago. That year, President Bush undertook a major GOP voter-targeting effort and secured a victory margin of about 380,000 votes.
"The demographics of Florida have lined up better for us" than in some other battleground states, said Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, referring to the campaign's outreach to African Americans, who are numerous in Miami-Dade County. "Ohio is more about persuasion. Here it's more about turnout."