The All-Important Minority Vote

Steve Sailer once again wonders why most reporters assume that the minority vote is so important; a far better strategy for the G.O.P. is to increase its share of the white vote, rather than to keep pandering in order to get a few more percentage points from blacks or Hispanics.
I think that the reason why so many people see the minority vote as so important is BECAUSE in most cases it is so reliably liberal. If blacks vote 90% Democrat, then it would seem that a shift to 20 or 30% G.O.P. is a major win; just like it would be coup if Nader got 10-11% of the vote.
What actually matters in the end is whether there is a significant number of minority votes in the battleground states.
Furthermore, to a Wednesday morning election advisor on November 3, the only way that Bush getting a larger share of the minority vote will matter is if there are battleground states where Kerry won that would have gone for Bush if Bush had a higher share of the minority vote. Getting a higher share wouldn't have mattered if (a) Bush had won anyway, or (b) if Kerry won by a margin more than twice the number of minority votes that Bush could have abstracted (if Bush changes x minority votes from Kerry votes to Bush votes, then in effect the margin narrows by 2x, because each vote won by Bush is also a vote lost to Kerry - the mathematics is more complicated if we include people who decided between voting and not voting or who were convinced to vote/not vote for a third party candidate). I think last election, a higher black vote for Bush would only have mattered in Arizona (Arizona had 185,599 blacks, probably at least 50,000 of whom would be registered voters, and Gore won by only 386 votes) and Florida, (~2.3 million blacks, probably including >750,000 registered voters) where a higher number of blacks voting G.O.P. would not have changed the final outcome but might have prevented the three-week recount crisis.

But psychologically, if Bush had gotten 20% of the black vote, it would have devastated the Democrats; and that's what most people think about.