Timothy Noah adds a bit more to the important analysis that John offered today, titled “What We Didn’t Overcome: Why you can’t blame it all on the South”:

Obama won the white vote in 18 states and in Washington, D.C. All 18 states lie outside the South, and most are predictably liberal. (New York, Vermont, etc.). But Obama lost the white vote in eight of the states where he won the overall popular vote. That’s no great surprise in North Carolina or Virginia, the two Southern states Obama carried, or even in Pennsylvania or Ohio, where white working-class voters were known to be resistant. It’s a little surprising in Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico. All three states have Democratic governors and Democratically controlled state legislatures.

That is, Obama lost the white vote in 60+ percent (32) of the states. And, of course, whites are the largest group of voters, and Senator Obama lost them at about the same rate as Gore in 2000, by 12 percentage points.

— In the worst economic meltdown since the 1930s so far and likely getting worse, with many retirement pensions way down by 30-50 percent, with massively declining health care, and two disastrous wars–all substantially the result of the “white Republican” party’s (and especially its wealthy supporters’) decisions in its 8 years in power…..

Attention mass media, you should do major stories on this: White racism is not dead in the US.