New York Times : Why Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado may be possible for President Obama 2012, and why Ohio is difficult but not impossible. Add Florida - Obama is assiduously, persistently, constantly visiting these five states

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Terry Nelson, Campaign Adviser to George W. Bush, John McCain : "The truth is, Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008".

Latinos may be a buoying factor in four of these five key Swing States, but not so important in Ohio. ( Growing Demography )

Arizona and Georgia may become Democrat sometime in the Future. Republicans see good prospects for winning industrial-belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

New York Times

Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election

By JACKIE CALMES and MARK LANDLER

September 29, 2011


Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election


Some excerpts :

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.”

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