SOME TRUTHS ABOUT OBAMA'S ELECTION!

Truth about Obama's election......I read a very opinion by someone who mentioned a story about running into a man who claimed to have lived in the US for 18 years and said "most people in the US are blacks". That person making such a absurd claim is either lying about having lived in the US for that long or lived in isolation in a cave in Alaska.

Given that your opinion column had a lot of letters about the 2008 US Presidential election, I am presenting the following data about the US population. This is a summary of US 2006 Census data on demographics.

· Males: 147,434,940 (49.2% of pop.)

· Females: 151,963,545 (50.8% of pop.)

· White: 221,331,507 (73.9% of pop.)

· Black: 37,051,483 (12.4% of pop.)

· Asian: 13,100,095 (4.4% of pop.)

· American Indian and Alaska Native: 2,369,431 (0.8% of pop.)

· Hispanic/Latino1: 44,252,278 (14.8% of pop.)

· Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander: 426,194 (0.1% of pop.)

· Median age: 36.4

Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004. Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to some analyses.

During this election, Obama won 95% of the Black vote and nearly 60% of the Hispanic vote (which was highly significant and a major shift); he also won a fair share of the under 30 vote regardless of race and that was significant. Obama also carried the female vote at higher numbers than McCain. McCain’s desperate measure to attract female voters by nominating Sarah Palin failed amongst moderate, well educated, urban women who are not too far to the religious right.

Obama did not carry a majority of the White male vote but he made significant gains in comparison to John Kerry with about 42% of the White Male vote to 52% odd of the white male vote going to McCain.

In the South, Obama lost the white vote by large margins with the exception of Virginia and North Carolina, where he got enough young white voters plus an overwhelming number of Black votes to carry those two states. In these Southern states (with the exception of North Carolina and Virginia), the white vote went overwhelmingly to John McCain. The most lopsided McCain vote was in the Bible Belt South Western state of Oklahoma and the most lopsided Obama vote was in Washington DC. In Oklahoma, even the under 30 age group vote went 60-30 in favour of McCain whereas in Virginia it went 6-30 in favour of Obama!

Overall Obama received 52.3% of the popular vote to McCain’s 46.2%. His was like the new coalition that Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunge put together for the the SLFP led PA in 1994 which was able to cross ethnic and religious lines in an unprecedented manner. It is safe to say Obama carried enough white votes amongst the younger age group to defeat McCain. This would be the group who did not see the struggles of the civil rights era and are less prone to bias based on colour or race and are more integrated than the older white voters. Informed voters went to Obama by a big margin while the LIVs (Low Information Voters) went mostly to McCain and Palin.

Please be careful about some other facts as well; there’s an email being spread around by ignorant people that Nostradamus predicted this election result and it cites a fictitious Professor from Smithsonian. That bogus news report was refuted by the world renowned Smithsonian Institution. They do not have any manuscript purporting to be from Nostradamus and nor do they have a professor by the name in that fake news story. I verified that by writing to Smithsonian. This sort of story gains ground amongst extreme evangelical types in Sri Lanka as well. They would believe anything including works of fiction about Iran building a doomsday weapon that will vaporize humans and leave buildings intact.

Be very careful of stories being spread on the Internet. Just because it is on a computer that does not mean it is true.

Mano Ratwatte

www island.lk