Posted on 11/08/2012 12:51:50 PM PST by Eric Pode of Croydon
Over the next few days, I will cover a variety of issues I believe explain what happened in Ohio in 2012. The first issue starts at the very beginning of the process in Ohio. Now, it is always tricky to extrapolate primary data to general-election data, but I believe two data points, discussed below, from Ohio’s primary foreshadowed problems for Republicans and in the base with Governor Mitt Romney.
First, in the 2008 fully contested Democratic primary between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, 2,386,945 Ohioans cast ballots. Remember, Ohio has open primaries where voters select either a Democratic or a Republican ballot and vote in the primary race they select. Fast-forward four years to the fully contested 2012 Republican primary between Senator Rick Santorum and Governor Mitt Romney (and a few others whose names remained on the ballot). In that contest, 1,213,879 Ohioans vote. As a point of comparison, in 2000, 1,397,528 Ohioans vote in the Republican primary won by Texas governor George W. Bush. That is, nearly 200,000 more votes were cast twelve years earlier.
Comparing the 2008 Democratic-primary vote count with the 2012 Republican-primary vote count shows that roughly 1,173,066 more Ohioans voted in the Democratic primary four years ago than in the Republican primary this year. Think about that for a moment: Nearly 1.1 million more Ohioans voted for Democrats in 2008 than for Republicans in 2012. Presumably many of those Ohioans who voted for Obama in the 2008 primary voted for him in the general election, helping him win Ohio by a comfortable margin, and helped him win again in 2012, when he won about 300,000 fewer votes across the state, where turnout was down by more than 400,000 votes from what it was in 2008.
The second data point involves looking at the results from the Republican primaries in Ohio in 2008 and 2012. In 2012, Senator Santorum lost the primary but won 69 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The 69 counties he won are the most conservative in Ohio — the voters there are the Republican base. That Santorum won so many of them indicated that Romney had an issue with the base issue.
Dig a little deeper and the problem becomes far bigger. In 40 out of the 69 base counties that Santorum won, Romney received fewer votes than Mike Huckabee received in 2008 in a largely uncontested primary. (McCain had sown up the nomination by then.) That corroborates for me that the Republican base was not enthusiastic about Romney. Many people believed that Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate ameliorated some of that problem, but the results from last night don’t support that narrative.
Specifically, despite what we were told was the most sophisticated and successful ground game by a Republican in the history of the world, the turnout in Ohio declined 2.05 percent and in all but nine counties (although, to judge from the vote totals, the decline reflected on the Democratic GOTV effort even more than on the GOP side). In a year far better for the Republican presidential candidate than 2008, Romney received 93,200 fewer votes in Ohio than McCain did four years earlier. As it stands today, Obama won Ohio in 2012 by 107,241 votes, only 14,000 votes more than the margin by which Romney lost to McCain.
No matter how you look at it, it seems clear that the base in Ohio did not show up as it needed to do for Romney to win Ohio.
(2) The fact that Mayer apparently needs this analysis to conclude that "the Republican base was not enthusiastic about Romney" indicates that he is either mildly retarded, or has never actually met a member of the Republican base.
ping
Few Republicans vote in the presidential primaries here in Ohio. By the time it rolls around here, the decision has already been made. Voting is a mere formality.
Even if the GOP base was not enthusiastic about Romney, they SHOULD have been enthusiastic about removing the commie kenyan. I’m beginning to wonder if all the big reports of Romney having 30,000 at rallies and Hussein having 2800 made some people a little over-confident and they didn’t bother to vote.
(3) Mayer didn’t get into the fact that military absentee ballot registration was down by 70%... and down by 92% in VA.
RINOism is only one of the major reasons Romney lost.
1) Hire a real debate coach before even forming an exploratory committee;
2) Hire a video coordinator (assistant debate coach) who will run you through montages of all the critical Akin, Mourdock, "Romney 47%", Cain foreign policy, et al. blunders, frame by frame, once a day.
We can all thank Leon Panetta for that.
These analysts are not really interested in looking at fraud on a massive scale.
My eyes were opened to fraud in college when I watched The Machine stuff ballots for their candidate right before my very eyes. It was a young college republican club. The guy who won that election graduated soon thereafter and went to work for a Democrat in Birmingham. There was a professor who documented voter disenfranchisement in a neighboring county, and nothing has been done about it to this day. He video recorded it. I have a vague recollection it made the national news. But no one would touch it because it was a predominantly black county.
What happened ? What do my lying eyes SEE ??? > FRAUD <
reference your (2) don’t forget “I am not a witch!” It amazes me that anyone with three functioning neurons thought she was a plausible Senator.
Bingo.
I'll also say I suspect the Senate Bill 5 fiasco turned off plenty of NE Ohio, union member, Reagan Democrats who may have otherwise voted for Romney.
Turns out that disgust at the months of ads, mailers and knocks on the door had moved many previously high propensity voters into the low propensity voter category. BO's folks understood the situation, heck, they created it. So they cajoled their turned off (formerly) high propensity voters to vote during early voting. Romney left his (formerly) high propensity voters to show up on their own on Tuesday, and far too few of them did.
It is estimated that more black people, not fewer, voted in 2012 than 2008. More Latinos voted, not fewer, and an even greater percentage of them supported Obama this time. The youth vote did not decline from 2008. All this despite flagging enthusiasm for the president. Here’s a telling anecdote related by a senior Obama aide to the press pool on Wednesday’s flight from Chicago back to Washington. During flight, a campaign official talked about the ground game on background . . . In describing the ground game, the official told of a conversation he had with a top field director on Monday. The GOP had tweeted that they had knocked on 75,000 doors in Ohio the day prior. Not to worry, the director said, “we knocked on 376,000.” Then the president came in, and this aide said, “Tell him the door thing.” So he did. And the president responded, “That’s my team.” That was not Romney’s team. Romney’s team was back in Boston Tuesday night, watching in awe:
Let me tell you. In my area, the DNC played the hell out of the ad of the workers building a stage to hear about the Romney/Bain Capital closing a plant and moving those jobs to China.
(Which was funny -ha ha, because Carl Icahn just bought up troubled Navistar stocks. The company was contemplating layoffs. Those union workers had Obama signs in their yards.)
I didn’t hear any news stories about the unmotivated Republican base. You figure the MSM would have loved to report on it, wonder why it was such a huge blind spot for them?
OFA had a presence in Ohio since 2007. They didn’t go away after the 2008 election, they built up. That is where all that money went.
This is an awful analysis. Only 90% of the votes in Ohio are estimated to have been counted so far. Yet he compares the partial vote totals for 2012 to the final certified vote total in 2008.
Factoring that in, About 7% more people voted for Romney in 2012 than McCain in 2008 in Ohio.
I expect people like Limbaugh to screw this up, but I expect better from National Review.
It would be interesting to compare county by county vote Romney vote totals against the Santorum vote totals in the same counties, i.e. did Santorum voters stay home?
While I've never voted for a Democrat in an election that mattered, the primaries were important in those days. At least you could pick the weakest candidate to run against your real preference.
I changed my registration during Reagan's candidacy.
I became disenchanted with the Republican party with the nomination of Bob Dole; increasingly disenchanted with the nomination of John McCain (the only Presidential election I did not vote in since I was able to vote).
When the Republican establishment was pushing Romney, I initially said "no" and pledged my support to my friend Gary Johnson.
At the last minute, I voted for Romney to no avail.
The Republican Party has lost me.
In this last election, my candidates of choice won only at the County and City levels.
That's clearly where the future lies. I'm going to the County Clerk's office and registering as a Democrat tomorrow; simply so I can have a voice in my government.
I will not vote that way, but the stupid party has finally gotten my goat after 4 decades.
I can understand conservatives who decided not to get involved in a progressive buzzard fight. For me, it was not the right thing to do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.