Demographics between Obama and McCain voters are significant

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research held a panel discussion to present and analyze the results of the 2008 election.

There were significant differences in the manner that some demographics voted. Women favored Obama by large margins while men did not. Unmarried voters favored Obama overwhelmingly, while married voters barely favored McCain. The religious gap was also significant, as weekly churchgoers favored McCain and voters who never attended church favored Obama by a huge margin.

Democrats participated at a higher rate than Republicans during the primaries and general election, said Michael Barone, a fellow at AEI. “What really shaped the last 40 days of the election was the financial crisis,” said Barone. “When you look at the...average of polling Barack Obama passes John McCain on September 18th and is never behind after that.”

The panel also discussed the future of the GOP. The current Republican strategy will not increase the base, said David Frum, a fellow at AEI and former special assistant to President George W. Bush. He pointed to evidence showing that extremely poor Whites, college-educated Whites and Latinos where growing increasingly Democratic.

There will be “A strong argument within the Republican party that there is nothing wrong with our message,” said Frum. He further stated that Republicans will try to continue saying their message, only they will say it louder.

“I think this would be a very wrong wrong way to think,” said Frum, “this is not going to be helpful and this is not going to work. The great question over the near term Republican future is do they figure that out now or do they figure that out in 2013...or 2017? It took the Democrats three presidential terms to figure out that the days of the New Deal and the Great Society were behind them...the more successful you have been with a particular political formula the longer it can take to realize it has reached its sell-past date.”

Obama and McCain's record-breaking campaign finances

A discussion at the Brookings Institute focused on campaign effects of the money, ads and mobilization of the 2008 presidential election.

Both campaigns broke records and raised a combined total of $1 billion, said Anthony Corrado, a fellow at the Brookings Institute. While McCain's campaign was well-funded, it was dwarfed by Obama's campaign, which raised more money than John Kerry's and George Bush's 2004 presidential campaigns combined.

In order to compete with Obama, McCain had to rely heavily on the Republican party to run advertisements, said Corrado. Thus, McCain had less control over the messages of the ad. Overall the Republican ads took a negative tone and also attacked other Democrats running for office, making them appear more partisan than Obama's ads.

The overall increase in campaign financing and the huge advantage that Barack Obama has isn't troubling to political scientists, said Larry Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. "To put [it] into historical comparison," said Bartles, "if you go back to before the reforms 1970s, it was quite common for Republican presidential candidates to have two-to-one funding advantages over their Democratic opponents...to gauge the effect of that on the election outcomes, it looks like that contributed something like three percentage points to the average Republican vote margin."