I was watching the individual counties on election day using Politico and seeing an improvement for Romney over McCain across the board in in counties in Virginia, Florida and North Carolina and the final vote counts there show that as well. Romney did improve turnout slightly in Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Colorado if those are the final numbers.
I see that he lost 100,000 votes in Ohio though and that’s a bit fishy.
I don’t know where else the difference in his final vote tally is. Perhaps its the Hurricane or people are just better at knowing in what states their votes don’t matter much. Though in some states perhaps it was a little fruad involved such as Pennsylvania.
One other thing to consider, though I doubt that is a large reason is that a lot of our vote is in the elderly and we obviously would have lost some elderly voters to natural causes in the last 4 years.
If it really is turnout somehow than great. But I don’t think that is the whole story.
You’re right, as the numbers filled in it does seem Romney generally achieved more votes than McCain, although there still seems to be a Republican undervote compared to what had been expected before the election given factors like party prefrences and enthusiasm, which supposedly both favored the ‘pubs - I’m hoping the party spends a major effort on investigating “mechanical” issues, like how to get more of its own people to the polls in the future and your idea about old people dying off (although as we all live longer, it’s probably the case that the percentage of older folks is actually increasing) before running off to “adjust the message” or “reaching out more to minorities” or some of the other tangential curealls being tossed around.......