CNBC.com Barack Obama

If Tuesday's election were confined to white America, polls show, Barack Obama would be losing. And yet Mr. Obama's strength across racial lines lies at the heart of his edge over John McCain heading into Election Day.

Remarkably, the first African-American nominee in history trails among whites by less than Democratic nominees normally do. America's political parties grew decisively polarized by race after 1964, the year Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation that Republican opponent Barry Goldwater opposed.

Since then, Democratic presidential nominees have averaged 39% of the white vote. In last week's New York Times/CBS News poll, Obama drew 44% support from whites—a higher proportion than Bill Clinton captured in his general election victories.

Combined with his two to one edge among Hispanics and his ten to one edge among blacks, that has given him a national lead. Analysts ascribe that success to various factors.

One is changing racial attitudes in a country that’s growing steadily more diverse. Whites made up 86% percent of the electorate when Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, but just 77% four years ago.

A second factor is Obama’s success in presenting his campaign agenda as benefiting middle class Americans across racial lines. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll Asked whether an Obama presidency would favor blacks over other Americans. Eight in 10 whites said it would not.

For Democratic strategists who have spent their careers trying to overcome racial tensions and regain white voters' allegiance, that alone is a striking achievement. “Maybe he has crossed over into Tiger Woods territory,” said pollster Stan Greenberg, who advised Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign.

Frustrated Republicans say that’s only part of it. Some point to President Bush's unpopularity in threatening economic times and say he has veered close to Herbert Hoover terrority. This fall’s meltdown on Wall Street, by frightening many Americans about the economic future, has helped Obama make the case for change from Republican policies.

As Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University polling institute put it, in this election "The most important color is green."

This past spring, some Democratic strategists feared Obama might be crippled in states where he lost working class white primary voters decisively to Hillary Clinton. But polls show that he’s now competitive with John McCain in Ohio and leading in Pennsylvania.

Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a foot-soldier in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, told me Obama’s success among white voters is "amazing—almost unreal." Lewis said he only regrets that leaders he followed in that movement, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson, aren’t around to witness Obama's candidacy.

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