ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In a radio interview with Al Sharpton yesterday, the president urged African-American voters not to sit out the midterm elections, even if the Democratic Senate candidates and their states have been distancing themselves from him.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The bottom line is, though, these are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress.
SIEGEL: Those comments were immediately labeled a gift to Republicans running for the Senate. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports on the president's delicate balancing act.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: In recent days, President Obama has been making the rounds on African-American radio shows, like Al Sharpton's show and Steve Harvey's.
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OBAMA: I'll bet a whole bunch of your listeners aren't even thinking about this elections coming up on November 4.
KEITH: And "The Russ Parr Morning Show."
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OBAMA: Here's what doesn't work, is just sitting home and complaining about stuff.
RUSS PARR: There you go.
OBAMA: You know, but what does work is when people go out there and make it their personal business.
KEITH: Listeners to these shows tend to be younger and more diverse than the general population. And President Obama wants to make sure they vote in November. Cornell Belcher is a Democratic pollster and strategist who worked on both of the Obama presidential campaigns.
CORNELL BELCHER: These voters are not conventional voters. They're not conventional Democratic voters. They're Obama voters.
KEITH: Meaning they may not have voted before supporting Obama and have to be motivated to vote again. Belcher says a key for Democrats this time around is getting these so-called Obama voters to show up for a midterm election when Obama's name isn't on the ballot.
BELCHER: In order for us to, in fact, not have 2010 again, we need to go where these voters are, and we need to give voice to these voters in a unique way. And the person who has been most successful at doing that has, in fact, been President Obama.
KEITH: But in this modern age of instant communications, it's not so easy to talk just to the audience you're trying to reach. Obama told Sharpton red state Democratic candidates are his strong allies and supporters, and it immediately went viral. Lester Spence is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
LESTER SPENCE: When you send them signals making them want to participate that's geared towards that specific demographic, then you're almost, by definition, going to use language that sounds to them innocuous but sounds to the other side like the equivalent of, like, a sonic hand grenade.
KEITH: A hand grenade because Obama's remarks contradicted a number of Democrats' careful efforts to distance themselves from him. Andra Gillespie is a political scientist specializing in African-American politics at Emory University.
ANDRA GILLESPIE: One could argue that perhaps he shouldn't have shown his hand in that way, but I think he was trying to make explicit the wink and the nod that lots of people have kind of intuitively assumed was going on in African-American communities anyway.
KEITH: The wink and the nod, implying these candidates may not be saying exactly what you want to hear, but they're better than the alternative and things could be different after the election. Gillespie says it's something African-American voters have become accustomed to. And it's an undercurrent of a Democratic National Committee radio ad targeting black voters.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: No Democratic president in U.S. history has faced the level of obstruction from the Republicans that Barack Obama has. It's critical that we continue to fight for change and vote on November 4.
KEITH: The question is will all this direct messaging work or will it backfire? Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
