The president is holding his advantage with the groups that boosted him to victory four years ago, but he can't rest easy.
Four recent national polls, including three released in the past 24 hours, generally show the electorate dividing between President Obama and Mitt Romney along lines of class, gender and race familiar from the 2008 race.
The surveys -- from ABC and the Washington Post; the Pew Research Center; CNN/ORC; and the first Gallup tracking poll, diverge in their overall results. The first three polls show Obama leading by seven, four and nine percentage points respectively; the first Gallup track placed Romney up by two percentage points.
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But the Gallup track, which is conducted among registered voters, has a sample that looks much more like the electorate in 2010 than the voting population that is likely to turn out in 2012: only 22 percent of the Gallup survey was non-white, according to figures the organization provided to Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. That was close to the non-white share of the vote in 2010 (23 percent), but in 2008, minorities comprised 26 percent of all voters, according to exit polls; the Obama campaign, and other analysts, project the minority share of the vote will increase to 28 percent in 2012. In its survey, Pew, for instance, puts the non-white share at 25 percent.
The division between the white and non-white share of the vote profoundly affects the results because all of the surveys show a racial gap between Obama and Romney that could be at least as large as 2008. In that campaign, Obama became the first candidate ever to lose whites by double-digits and still win the presidency. John McCain outpolled Obama among whites by 55 percent to 43 percent, but Obama won decisively anyway by carrying a cumulative 80 percent of minorities, including 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics. The race also produced a sharp divide within the white population: McCain amassed big margins among white men with and without a college degree, and non-college white women, the so-called waitress moms. Obama carried a majority only of white women with at least a four year degree.