Barack Obama may have run one of the most successful presidential campaigns in American history, but the exit poll data suggest that he did not achieve the overwhelming election victory that many had predicted.

Increased Democratic Party identification, dismally low approval ratings for President Bush, and widespread anxiety over the economy and the financial crisis should have guaranteed Obama a huge win. Yet he garnered only 52 percent of the popular vote, one percentage point higher than George W. Bush’s popular vote total in 2004 and one point lower than that of George H.W. Bush in 1988. At a recent American Enterprise Institute conference, AEI scholar Michael Barone argued that such results make Obama’s triumph “overdetermined and underdelivered.”

Despite a record-breaking spike in voter registration—fueled heavily by the efforts of the Obama campaign—voter turnout barely budged. A recent study released by American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate found that roughly 60.7 percent to 61.7 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008, which reflects at most a one percentage point increase from 2004.

The negligible change in youth turnout is equally surprising. Though Obama captured more than two-thirds of voters between the ages of 18 and 29—the largest percentage win among this demographic in the last ten presidential elections—only 18 percent of eligible voters in that demographic cast ballots, compared to 17 percent in 2004.

If college-educated whites continue trending Democratic, Republicans will face a significant disadvantage in future elections.

To be sure, President-elect Obama can claim a mandate. He built a diverse coalition of supporters, ranging from affluent white professionals in the suburbs to working-class Hispanics in the cities, and won an Electoral College landslide. The 2008 election may not have signaled a realignment of the national political map, but it did confirm that Democrats now have a stranglehold on the Northeast—after the defeat of Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, Republicans do not control a single House seat in New England—and are consolidating their support in the upper Midwest, the Rust Belt, and northern Virginia. In the Mountain West, Democrats have turned Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico into “blue” states.

The reduced appeal of the Republican Party may be the result of what AEI scholar David Frum calls an “ecological squeeze.” At the recent AEI conference, Frum said that Obama contributed to this “squeeze” by attracting many voters who once made up a key segment of the GOP base, including whites with a college education. This demographic is growing: in 1990, 22 percent of whites held a college degree, compared to 28.5 percent today. If college-educated whites continue trending Democratic, Republicans will face a significant disadvantage in future elections. The GOP must also do better among Hispanics, who went heavily for Obama and represent a fast-growing segment of the electorate in key battleground states such as Florida and Colorado.

Is there any good news for Republicans? The party’s base did remain relatively intact. According to the exit polls, 78 percent of self-identified conservatives and 89 percent of self-described Republicans voted for the McCain-Palin ticket. If the Republicans have any hope of staging a comeback in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they must find some way to energize their conservative base while also reaching out to upscale whites, Hispanics, and the other demographic groups that helped make 2008 such a big year for the Democrats.

Alexis Hamilton is assistant editor of THE AMERICAN. 

Image by Darren Wamboldt/The Bergman Group.