“problem is, black voters can’t win or lose a national election by themselves.
the correct question should be, would whites have voted for obama had they known he was white ?”
The race was so close in reality that I do think that the overwhelming support Obama got from the black community DID have just that effect. You really do have to go on a county by county basis. I am no electoral number cruncher, so I can’t say for sure, but given what I do know it seems possible to me that it made enough of a difference to give him the states he had to have to win.
In my opinion, perception is more important than reality to the general public. So his exact DNA components really didn't matter to blacks or whites; and won't in the future, either. He looks black, therefore people wanting to vote skin color or emotion will do so regardless. They imagine he experiences life as a black person, and they have justification to do so. He married a black woman and has consciously adopted himself into the black community. That's all most people want to think about.
Remember, this is a nation that had the one-drop rule until 1967. This is a nation where the main teacher's union thinks that transsexuals actually are the other sex after they are drugged and mutilated, even though their DNA remains the gender they were at birth. Perception is everything.
The most important issues are not why he is suppressing his information, but what is the truth of the information, and were any crimes committed in the suppression of the information?
The counties definitely turned bluer,
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/election2008/election_night/countymap.html
but...
The race really wasn’t that close. McCain lost by approx 10 million popular vote, and got buried in the electoral vote.
Black population by states:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/peo_tot_bla_pop-people-total-black-population
I haven’t yet found a black vote by state.
Approx 15.9 million blacks voted. Mostly in states that would have gone RAT anyway.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1209/racial-ethnic-voters-presidential-election