WASHINGTON — As they ponder a political map that has spelled defeat for Democrats in the last two presidential elections, Barack Obama's campaign strategists are quietly laying plans to draw African American voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers by capitalizing on the excitement over the prospect of electing the nation's first black president.
Obama strategists believe they have identified a gold mine of new and potentially decisive Democratic voters in at least five battleground states -- voters who failed to turn out in the past but can be mobilized this time because Obama's candidacy is historic and his cash-rich campaign can afford the costly task of identifying and motivating such supporters.
In Florida alone, more than half a million black registered voters stayed home in 2004. Hundreds of thousands more African Americans are eligible to vote but not registered. And campaign analysts have identified similar potential in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri and Ohio.
In these five states, which were crucial to the GOP's presidential success in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush's victory margins were generally slim enough to suggest that a major expansion of black turnout could lead to Democratic gains this year.
"I think the numbers are going to be astonishing," said Florida state Rep. Joseph A. Gibbons, who heads the state's black legislative caucus and has been discussing the strategy with leading Democrats.
John Bellows, a database expert in the Obama campaign, said he had already identified "big pockets of potential voters" in key states. "There are pretty big numbers lying around to turn out," he said.
The strategy requires a deft touch and carries risks, however.
In large part, Obama, an Illinois senator who is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has succeeded so far by appealing across racial lines. Strategists say he cannot afford to appear to be exploiting race or running solely as a black candidate -- particularly as he courts moderate whites and blue-collar workers who did not support him in the primaries.
"It's a sensitivity," said Ronald Walters, a strategist for African American Democrat Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in the 1980s. Walters has criticized Democratic candidates in the past as sidelining black voters by ceding the South to Republicans. "You've got to have a black strategy, but it has to be a biracial strategy."
