Center for American Progress. May 14, 2013.
According to the Census Bureau’s figures, 66.2 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot in 2012, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic white voters. Moreover, an estimated 2 million fewer white Americans voted in the election, while about 1.8 million more blacks surged to the polls. And, as exit polls suggested, an estimated 90-plus percent of black voters chose President Obama over Gov. Romney. [Note: contains copyrighted material].
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2013/05/14/63318/2012-election-was-a-historic-first-for-black-voters/ [HTML format].
Congressional Research Service. May 10, 2013.
There is a consensus that the presidential public financing program is antiquated and offers insufficient benefits to attract the most competitive candidates. No major candidate accepted public funds in 2012. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama became the first person, since the public financing program’s inception, elected President without accepting any public funds. For some, these developments signal an urgent need to save the public campaign financing program that has existed since the 1970s; for others, they suggest that the program is unnecessary.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41604.pdf [PDF format, 6 pages].
U.S. Census Bureau. May 8, 2013.
About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics on voting by the eligible citizen population in 1996. The report provides analysis of the likelihood of voting by demographic factors, such as race, Hispanic origin, sex, age and geography (specifically, census divisions). It draws upon data from the November 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement and looks at presidential elections back to 1996. Using the race definitions from 1968 and the total voting-age population, whites voted at higher rates than blacks in every presidential election between 1968, when the Census Bureau began publishing voting data by race, and 1992.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-568.pdf [PDF format, 13 pages].
Brookings Institution. January 4, 2013.
William Galston analyzes the political backdrop against which the 2012 general campaign was waged, offering fuller context into voter attitudes, the composition of the winning coalition, and the events, economic realities, policy and ideological issues that shaped the election and President Obama’s eventual victory. [Note: contains copyrighted material].
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/1/04%20presidential%20election%20galston/04presidentialelection [PDF format, 19 pages].
