It's only 3:40pm, and I have already read perfectly plausible arguments asserting that labor, young people, women, blacks, Hispanics, and white voters provided Obama his crucial margin. And you know what? They're all right! If you subtracted enough points among any of those groups, Obama would have lost the election. But the argument being made by the organizations who claims to speak for those groups is sightly different: That their group, and really their group alone, was the necessary additive for victory, and as such, their concerns should get a special hearing in the White House. But what's interesting about Obama's win is that it really was everybody. Every group supported him at a higher rate than they'd supported Kerry. And no group really amped up turnout to a particularly extraordinary degree -- even young folks and African-Americans were only a point or two higher than in 2004. This was not a Mark Penn win, where a single slice of the electorate was identified as crucial and aggressively targeted. Moreover, Obama didn't really do that much to appeal to any group in particular. Indeed, his campaign -- which memorably ceased going to constituency forums during the primary -- really did run on a "politics of the common good" style message, and really made an effort to eschew the sort of politicking that chunked the electorate into discrete groups and tried to simply supercharge one or two of them. Obama won because he received a higher level of support from the country, not from a narrow slice of it. And the upside of that for his administration is that they don't owe any particular constituency more than any other.
