Race Isn't The Problem For Obama

The president of the AFL-CIO is worried that President Obama is doing poorly among white, working class, male voters -- and he plans on putting 400,000 of his troops in the field in six key states to change the equation.

Recent polls show the president doing poorly with white males with less than a college education. Mitt Romney leads the president among white males voters by more than 2-to-1 in a recent Washington Post poll, with the president favored by only 28 percent of this demographic group. Other polls show similar results. Republicans have won a majority of white males' votes in most recent elections; but the president has slipped significantly among this cohort from his last race. In 2008, Obama carried 39 percent of white male votes.

Richard Trumka, the former coal miner who now leads the 8.4 million- member AFL-CIO, hopes he can at least convince his own white male members to vote for Obama. But, apparently, he doesn't have a very high opinion of those who choose not to follow his lead. He recently told Reuters that of the 1-in-4 union members who didn't vote for Obama in 2008, "some of this I think was pure racism. Some of them would be gun owners, some of them would be right-wing. Some of them would be ... died-in-the-wool Republicans."

More