LW: In the course of researching for your book, what was some of the most surprising data you came across?

KG: Like I said, I wasn't sure what constituted a trend, but I had about five people that I thought were from diverse geographic locations and diverse backgrounds but had commonalities — they were all African American, they were all post-Civil Rights generation, and they were all registered independent. So when I set about doing my research one of the things I wanted to find out what how wide spread this trend I was seeing was, in terms of hard numbers. I wanted to approach this like a detective, following the trail of evidence and the clues and letting the end result fall where it would. So in addition to interviewing voters, I also wanted to really collect a compilation of data including interviews with young black voters and leaders, and I wanted people, from conservatives, to people in hip hop, to people who were traditional liberals. I interviewed everyone from Colin Powell to Al Sharpton to Erika Harold, who is the former Miss America 2003 who is multiracial, identifies as black, and is also a conservative.

And I also wanted there to be hard data, so I teamed up with a former professor of mine who runs the Political Research Center at Suffolk University, and we decided to embark upon a project on the politics of young black Americans which is not exactly a topic you see every news outlet jumping to cover. We decided to do a survey with a very respected polling institution. We did a survey of 400 randomly selected post-Civil Rights generation black Americans ages 18 to 45. Some of the most surprising findings: among 18-24 year olds, 35 percent identified as independent. The other big finding was that 41 percent of the 400 said they were Democrats but did not identify as committed Democrats. It means, I am a registered Democrat but politically independent, which is really interesting and not what we expected. It opens the door into a generation that does not have first-hand experience with the Civil Rights movement, which was really the catalyst for sparking a bond between black Americans and the Democratic party. And now we have this generation that has no first-hand recollection of that experience. Like the woman I quoted who said, you know, I didn't experience attack dogs and water hoses, you're seeing people drift away from the Democrat partisan politics.

LW: How can you relate those findings to whats happening now in the election?

KG: I think it's really interesting. It's so funny how they're rewriting the election narrative, because remember all those stories a year ago about Barack Obama not being black enough, right?

LW: He's frighteningly black now!

KG That's exactly where I'm going with this. Because a year ago he wasn't black enough and there were all these articles. And I reminded people in a recent piece that I wrote that the Washington Post/ABC News Poll as of February 2007 had Hillary Clinton ahead by 40 points with black voters. Fast forward to now, in recent contests in South Carolina, etc., he's won close to 90 percent of the black vote, and they're rewriting the narrative to say, of course, black voters are just lining up along racial lines. That's why they're voting for him. But you dig a little deeper, and you find that there are a variety of reasons that people tend to express admiration for Obama, and a lot of the reasons he's popular among young black Americans are the same reasons he's popular among younger white Americans.

Erika Harold, the 2003 Miss America I mentioned before, told me she voted for Barack Obama for Senate over staunch conservative Alan Keyes, who is another black American, the same year she appeared at the Republican National Convention, which sort of tells a lot about his appeal. Again, it's the idea that he's getting support from people for a variety of reasons not just race, even though that's been sort of the tendency of people to sort of simplify things like, oh, well, he won young black voters because they are just falling in line.