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In final campaign stretch, Hillary is racing to energize the African-American vote.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The key to the 2016 race has always been the make-up of the electorate. Will it look like the 2012 electorate that re-elected Barack Obama, or the 2014 electorate that resulted in Republicans winning the Senate and expanding their hold on Congress?

So far, as Greg Sargent notes in The Washington Post, there is both good news and bad news for Democrats. The good news is that there has been a surge in Latino- and Asian-American voting, likely due to disgust at Donald Trump’s xenophobic campaign. The bad news is that African-American voting has been lagging, partially as a result of new barriers to voting in states like North Carolina, but also possibly indicating less enthusiasm for Clinton than Obama.

As Sargent further observes, there are signs that Democrats recognize that, in the closing lap of the race, the focus has to be on re-energizing black voters. “A barrage of political celebrities are coming to the [North Carolina] in the next few days,” Sargent notes. “A host of outreach efforts and events are in the works, to try to make that happen.”