Romney Received 170,000 More Bible Belt Votes (raw totals counted so far) than McCain (Vanity)

November 9, 2012 | Strategerist

[Strategerist]

Simply based on CNN raw totals counted so far (no projection for votes not counted) Romney has 18,573,603 votes from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tenessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

McCain had 18,402,511 in those states. By the way, in 2004 Bush had 17,746,072 votes in those states.

Obviously there is no official definition of "Bible Belt" and PARTS of many other states would fit (Virginia, Colorado Springs, southern Indiana, etc.), and PARTS of the states I included as "Bible Belt" are definitely not full of Evangelicals.

Obviously the voting age population has grown over time in these states (though arguably most of that is Hispanics, not white Evangelicals); if you account for that based on US Census Data, and also that not all the votes are counted (one thing that is helpful is all of these states have almost all of their votes counted already) Romney would have lost less than 1% of the votes McCain had; compared to Bush it's about 3%, but most of that is a decline in Texas (obviously that Bush was from Texas greatly boosted his totals there relative to Romney, and McCain as well.)

[what's up]

if that was true, that would have shown up in the Bible Belt states.

Not if it was the catholics that didn't show up.

The swing states have large numbers of catholics. It may have been the number of these voters which were down and perhaps didn't want a RINO/Mormon.

Right here on FR there are many who say they didn't vote for Romney. I'd be curious to know if the majority of these were catholic.

[Synthesist]

There is ZERO evidence that any statistically significant numbers of Republicans didn’t vote for Romney because he was a RINO or Mormon - if that was true, that would have shown up in the Bible Belt states...

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After Romney lost the election, I read several opinions that it might have been because he did not get the full support of the conservatives and/or Evangelicals. I figured the best way to test that theory would be to compare his vote count with another republican candidate in my home state of Louisiana. I started by comparing the raw unofficial votes (provisional ballots haven’t been counted yet, but all precincts have reported) for Romney and the incumbent conservative Republican US Representative John Fleming, who was running in the 4th Congressional District.

Some background info about this district: The newly redrawn 2012 district covers all of western Louisiana except for the southern parishes near the coast. It is deep in the Bible Belt with a large mix of Protestants, Evangelicals, and Catholics. It is quite conservative. John Fleming won the district easily in the 2010 election and is so popular that no Dem even bothered to run against him in the 2012 election (a little known Libertarian was the only other candidate).

In most parishes within this district, Romney got MORE votes than Fleming, the opposite of what would be expected if conservatives/Evangelicals had turned their back on Romney. So much for that theory!

So where did these extra votes for Romney come from? I suspect that many of them came from Indies and maybe even a few Dems who voted for the moderate RINO Romney instead of the Marxist O, but still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the very conservative Fleming.

Reference links to the LA SoS site for the 2012 election:

http://staticresults.sos.louisiana.gov/11062012/11062012_46972.html

http://staticresults.sos.louisiana.gov/11062012/11062012_46257.html

[Wuli]

thanks for the update on this issue

I keep saying that we all need to tell Romney and his inner circle to do two things

“look at yourselves in the mirror and tell all the pundits to quit pointing fingers at scapegoats outside of the your team & the RNC”

the only thing the pundits are doing is getting all kinds of different Conservatives to point fingers at each other

even if they are “Conservative” pundits maybe that’s what they are trying to do in the first place