Winning football and winning politics

We're witnessing a disturbing trend for my political party of choice, and that trend manifested itself in a significant way this past Tuesday.

It seems that every demographic is trending away from the Republicans except for white men. That has been a very reliable demographic for Republicans, yet in Virginia, my current state of residence and a historically reliable red state, that group favored John McCain over Barack Obama by only a 50-48 margin.

I played a little college football at a little school called the University of Oklahoma. You may have heard of it. Our coach was Barry Switzer. Coach Switzer to this day has one of the highest winning percentages of any college football coach in NCAA history -- somewhere around 80 percent. He was head coach for 16 years, and he averaged winning 8 of 10 games a year over that period. Not bad.

I have heard Coach Switzer say on several occasions that to build a dynasty like we have at Oklahoma, and that we see at USC, Texas, Alabama, Ohio State, and other such places, you have to have two things: good coaches, and access to a pool of talent.

Political parties winning elections are much like football dynasties. You have to have two things: good candidates and steady access to a pool of voters.

There will be much Monday morning quarterbacking over the next couple of months concerning last Tuesday's shellacking, so I might as well put in my two cents worth now.

Obama was a good candidate and he tapped into a couple of pools of voters which had underperformed in the past two elections. Young people and black people produced big-time for him.

McCain was a good candidate, but one pool of voters that could have helped him tremendously were the values voters, and it seemed they underperformed.

In 2006, 66 percent of the evangelical community did not vote. In 2004, 52 percent of evangelicals did not vote. In 2000, 75 percent did not vote.

I haven't seen any stats on 2008 yet, but I'm not confident that McCain attracted a large segment of that vote, for whatever reason. He certainly stood for their values and principles more strongly than Obama, but couldn't seem to close the sale.

When you consider there are approximately 66 million evangelicals -- some place it as high as 90-100 million -- GOP candidates win when this demographic votes.

I don't want to take anything away from Obama. He won an impressive electoral victory with a nice majority of votes. A Democrat presidential candidate hasn't boasted a majority since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and that majority was less than 51 percent. So it was an impressive result, indeed. Obama helped increase his party's majorities in the U.S. Senate and House, and it was clearly due to the energy of the pool of voters into which he tapped.

Obama built the largest and broadest base ever for a presidential candidate.

Having stated the data behind the performing or underperforming pool of voters, you still have to admit that Obama ran a very impressive campaign -- not just in the general, but also in the primaries, where he beat the Clinton machine.

He raised more money than has ever been raised by a presidential candidate, he moved blocs of voters -- from blacks and other minorities to youth -- and, I would guess, even evangelicals. He literally found the promised land through those demographics.

Regardless of what one thinks of Obama's policies, this was a victory of magnificent proportion. If we're being honest with ourselves, it would have been hard for some to believe 35, 25, or even 10 years ago, that an American who happens to be black could ascend to the presidency.

Today, regardless of what one thinks of his policies, Americans can take pride in our nation's willingness to look beyond race in its leaders, and I salute our nation and President-elect Obama for the campaign he waged.

J.C. Watts (JCWatts01@jcwatts.com) is chairman of J.C. Watts Companies, a business consulting group. A former chairman of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House, where he served as an Oklahoma representative from 1995 to 2002, he writes a twice monthly column for the Review-Journal.