Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election

By JACKIE CALMES and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — With his support among blue-collar white voters far weaker than among white-collar independents, President Obama is charting an alternative course to re-election should he be unable to win Ohio and other industrial states traditionally essential to Democratic presidential victories.

Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Supporters reached out to greet President Obama at a Denver high school this week.

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Without conceding ground anywhere, Mr. Obama is fighting hard for Southern and Rocky Mountain states he won in 2008, and some he did not, in calculating how to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes. He is seeking to prove that those victories on formerly Republican turf were not flukes but the start of a trend that will make Democrats competitive there for years.

“There are a lot of ways for us to get to 270, and it’s not just the traditional map,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist. “That’s why we’re laying the groundwork across the country to compete on the widest possible playing field next year.”

While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slid across the board as unemployment remains high, what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina.

With growing cities and suburbs, they are populated by increasing numbers of educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.

“The biggest challenge” for Republicans, said Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, “is that they have to deal with what I would call the Obama electorate. And the Obama electorate is not the electorate that we have seen in America since I started working on presidential campaigns in 1980.”

Even so, Mr. Devine and other Democrats do not expect an easy race. “It’s not going to be a triumphal march to almost 54 percent of the vote and 365 electoral votes” like in 2008, he said. “It’s going to be a hard slog, like the ones we did in 2000 and 2004 and came up short. The only difference is, Obama has got places to go that we couldn’t go. We couldn’t even target North Carolina when Kerry’s running mate” — John Edwards, then a senator — “was from North Carolina.”

For Republicans, the reality of those changing demographics tempers their heightened hopes for beating Mr. Obama.

Terry Nelson, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush, John McCain and, this year, the former candidate Tim Pawlenty, said he was “pretty optimistic” for 2012, partly because Mr. Obama’s support among lower-income, less-educated white voters, never high, has dropped enough that Republicans see good prospects for winning industrial-belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But, Mr. Nelson acknowledged: “The country is changing. In every election cycle, every year, every day, this country becomes more ethnically diverse. And that has an impact on the kind of coalition that you need to put together to win.” He added, “The truth is, Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008.”

Mr. Obama’s recent travel reflects his calculus. On Tuesday, he was in Colorado, at a high school in a heavily Hispanic Denver neighborhood, to promote his jobs plan. This month he was in Ohio, but also in Virginia and North Carolina; he may return soon on a bus tour of neighboring states, aides say. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in Northern Virginia on Thursday.

Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado together have more than double the number of Ohio’s votes in the Electoral College — 37 versus 18. And Obama advisers say that the same demographic factors at play in those states are also present in states Mr. Obama lost in 2008 — like Arizona (whose senior senator, Mr. McCain, was his rival) and Georgia.

Except for Indiana, a long shot, Obama advisers say the president will be favored or competitive everywhere he won before, including Ohio. But polls underscore how tough a task he will have with independents in the industrial belt, where income and education levels are below the national average, compared with states like Colorado and Virginia with higher-income, better-educated independents.

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