Who elected Obama?

Here is a quote from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

"At JBHE we have been doing some calculations on the importance of the black vote in the 2008 presidential election. If Obama kept all the Hispanic vote that he won but lost all of the black vote that he won, Obama would have lost Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

This would have shifted 107 electoral votes to John McCain. This would have resulted in a 280-258 victory for McCain in the Electoral College.

Clearly, African-American voters were responsible for electing the nation’s first black president."

I'll ignore for now that they stated Florida twice. Oh, I guess I didn't *sheepish*. At any rate, while winning 95 percent of the African American vote was certainly important in electing Obama President, this isn't really significantly different than winning 90 percent of the vote from blacks, which just about every Democrat has done for decades. In addition, if you take away the Hispanic voters (67 percent voted for Obama) and keep the Black voters, then in Florida for sure and probably Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia as well, you'd end up with similar outcomes. How does that change the election. My point is this. The logic they used above is faulty from the start because it assumes that simply by removing the black vote from the equation, he would not have won, which overstates the role of the black vote. After all, 66 million people voted for Obama. 95 percent of the black vote, 62 percent of the asian vote, 67 percent of the hispanic vote and 43 percent of the white vote. So, using the logic stated in the above quote, their statement would most likely be true if you removed Hispanic voters as I stated above or definitely if you removed white voters. So, I could plug in Hispanic and White into the statement above and "clearly" conclude that whites are responsible for electing the first African American President, could I not? If there is a mathematician out there who would like to correct me, please do so, I'll admit if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. After all, whites make up approximately 74 percent of the population while blacks make up 13.5 percent, approximately, so surely the 43 percent of whites who voted for Obama was a much greater number than the 95 percent of blacks and therefore had a greater impact on the outcome of the election. Still don't believe me? Okay, let's do an exercise in math. If the 60 percent of voters remained true across racial lines, then of 300 million people (for the purpose of this exercise, we'll assume they can all vote), 222 million white people are eligible to vote for Obama (yes I know this is simplistic because I don't have any numbers for voting eligible persons). At any rate, that would mean that 4 million, 500 thousand black people are eligible to vote for Obama. So, which number is greater, 43 percent of 222 million or 95 percent of 4.5 million. That would be 95.5 million whites and 4.6 million blacks voting for Obama. So, who had the greater impact on the outcome of the election? I'm just saying. After all, their reasoning made me laugh, so surely they know it to? For a visual representation of what I'm trying to point out here, go here at the New York Times and click on the option to size bars according to share of the electorate and see what happens. Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should vote, so I was actually disappointed by a 60 percent turnout, as I always am with every Presidential election, but this statement was just so funny that I had to point out its flaw.