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nathanbedford: "This is the second article to appear within a few hours arguing in effect that the election result was baked in the cake and the campaigns altered destiny very little or not at all."

Something is wrong with this picture.
Consider the following numbers (from Wikipedia):

2004 Bush received 62 million votes (v. 59 million for Kerry).
2008 McCain received 59.9 million votes (v. 69.5 million for Obama) = McCain got 2.1 million fewer than Bush.
2012 Romney received 58.6 million votes (v. 61.8 million for Obama) = Romney got 1.3 million fewer than McCain.

I have not seen a breakdown, state by state, of 2008 vs. 2012, but everything suggests that very small numbers would have made a big difference.

So where did our previous votes go?
Who were those people, and what did they do in 2008 and 2012?

Seems to me that if we can't get our own voters to vote for our guy, then how can we ever convince more liberal-leaning ethnic, and other defined groups, that free-dom is better than Big Government's free-stuff.

Might I suggest one answer:

In 2004 Libertarians received 400,000 votes.
In 2008 Libertarians received 500,000 votes.
In 2012 Libertarians received 1.2 million votes.

So how many of those came from critical swing states?

I posted this in another thread:

Nielson ratings showed about a 6 million drop in election night viewers from 2008 to 2012.

Romney lost

VA by about 110k, out of 3.69 million or by about 3%
OH by about 100k, out of 5.29 million or by about 2%
PA by about 280k, out of 5.53 million or by about 5%
IA by about 90k, out of 1.54 million or by nearly 6%
CO by about 100k, out of 2.36 million or by about 4%

The overall totals so far are

Obama 61.7 million (51.3%) for 2012 and 69.5 million (53.7%) for 2008
Romney 58.5 million (48.7%) for 2012 and 59.9 million (McCain 46.3%) for 2008

Total 120.2 million for 2012 and 129.4 million for 2008

It would seem that several of the ‘swing states’ were not such swing states afterall.

Without substantial proof, voter fraud will be difficult to prove. The percentages in the swing states Obama won seem fairly consistent.