If this article is correct, our side never had a chance and we simply never connected with the public. The experience does not tell us whether we should move to the middle or move to the right.
Posted on 11/10/2012 9:49:38 AM PST by nathanbedford
Obama was handily favored every single day of the race. The closest thing to a game changer (by far) was the early disastrous debate in early Ocrober. But at no point, did Romney's odds of winning hit 50%. And by the middle of October, Obama was back on the re-ascent. Sandy didn't change anything. The 47% tape didn't change anything. Benghazi didn't change anything. Paul Ryan's selection didn't change anything, and so forth. Romney didn't lose because of a glitch in his election day Get Out The Vote app, which is something a lot of folks are talking about right now.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
If this article is correct, our side never had a chance and we simply never connected with the public. The experience does not tell us whether we should move to the middle or move to the right.
Nate Silver isn’t an independent pollster, he’s part of Obama’s political machine.
He only got national prominence by “predicting” Obama would beat Hillary, because he had inside information from OFA about the primaries.
All this talk about “Nate Silver this” and “Nate Silver that” just proves how Obama was ready to seal the deal by any means necessary from the start.
I never thought the GOP would nominate a candidate less appealing than John McCain-I didn't think it was possible-but they managed to accomplish just that.
The Leftwing media, govt handouts, and minority resentment are some of the primary reasons for the loss.
The way information is dispensed to the public must be modified.
Romney lost because morons vote. It’s that simple. Sadly, obamaphone-lady’s vote counts as much as yours.
As a friend of mine who was raised in Bulgaria under Communism stated:
“Romney promised a chance at a job, Obama promised foodstamps, cellphones, easy disability and housing subsidies. Game over.”
I think he should have picked Rubio for Veep, more appeal to the un-silent minority of youth and Latinos.
This explanation makes the most sense to me. Rather than blaming the loss on Hurricane Sandy, or Chris Christie, or Project ORCA, or other fluke events…
I do think there’s a lot of problems with the campaign infrastructure of the GOP… as far as recruiting new voters goes, as well as getting them into early voting or to the polls on election days.
Messaging is a major problem, too. Though it’s hard when most of the media is complicit in colluding against Republicans. And I suspect what’s far more damaging than the negative punditry by the news commentariat, is the fact that the media can decide at any time to quite simply block Republican candidates from having an effective voice at all.
Silver is a shill.
Right. I love Paul Ryan but his appeal to the unconverted was minimal at best. A congressman has never even won a state-wide vote and can’t even guarantee to bring along his own state. I was puzzled and concerned at the choice and thought Romney blew an opportunity. Again Ryan is more than aok in my book just not right as vp choice.
The really funny thing about the whole Nate Silver thing is that what he is doing is really not complicated or difficult....it IS however novel. No one really weighted pollsters in their averages the way he did.
All you have to do is throw all the polls in an algebraic equation and weight each pollster based on history, polling method (auto vs live call), percent of cell phones included, fundamentals like economic conditions, what he calls “house effect” which in my opinion is the strongest, and whatever else he deems appropriate.
If you lay out this equation and multiply each poll (X, Y, Z, etc) with a .5, .75, .9 etc based on their history, house effect, etc, you get a really accurate average.
Many bloggers have already started to replicate this method and the funny thing is, you can almost reverse engineer some if his model since he posts the weights in bars right there on his blog. Of course he could be BSing those published weights to maintain the proprietary nature of this model but maybe not.
All I did this year is average the polls and threw out Rasmussen and Gallup (for reasons posted many time before), gave automated polls a < 1 weight, internet polls a < 1 weight and threw out any polls with no history. With that pretty crude method, I was able to call Obama +1.8% and 290 (and possibly 303) for Obama in the electoral college.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2955102/posts?page=117#117
I didn’t see Florida at all, the one I missed. I’m not sure how Silver saw that one but next time around, I hope to have fun building a better model of my own.
It's damning but not for the reasons you cite. It's damning because it is obvious Republican vote elimination.
If you look at the graph you will see that as the summer progressed and the attacks by Obama against Romney went largely unanswered,the linesseparated and Obama increased his lead. So, I agree with your assessment.
You might recall that this is exactly what Dick Morris did before the 96 election to the Republicans so that by the time Bob Dole got the nomination and some money,he never had a chance either.
My view is that the Republicans should get on the radio now as the cheapest place from which to snipe and relentlessly attack the Obama administration and, working up to the midterm elections in 2014, Harry Reid and the Minority Leader of the house and demonize them for a welcome change. Although we will not have the media echoing these charges so that the landscape will not look like 2008 in which the whole world was blaming George Bush for everything since original sin, at least we may have a fighting chance.
When I deplore is the tendency among the conservatives on these threads no less than from the Republican establishment to advance their worldview from the results of this election. We need real data and we do not have any yet, at least not much to tell us why we could not get out the vote. This graph tells us that there was not any vote to get out but it does not tell us why and my surmise about unanswered attacks in the summer is only that.
Above all, we must maintain open minds and not let ideology drive us in the wrong direction. I want the answer to be that we should move to the right but I want that answer to come from real data and not from some talking head.
We don’t need to change a damn thing about what we believe.
What we need is for a healthy chunk of the MSM to be neutral.
Those of you who think mainstream media is dead are prema-
ture by a long way. We don’t need another FOX or more talk
radio. If our big money entities would take over a couple of
major papers and one established TV network with the idea
that news (political and otherwise) will truly played down the
middle then we will have a fair shot at winning because our
ideas are better. The liberals can never be counted on to be
fair. The self-righteous bastards just aren’t built that way.
Romney and GOPe stomped on the conservative base, took away any input from them at the national convention and from conventions in the future, and the conservative base stomped back and left the presidential line blank on the ballot. I watched that convention process from beginning to end and knew Romney, Sununu, Romeny’s lawyer and national chairman (GOPe) had shot themselves in the heart.
There are 4 swing states, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio. Thats it. The notion that Romney was going to win Wisconsin, Iowa etc was ridiculous. Republicans have not been a majority party since Reagan and may never be again. the other side has a bigger pool of votes and when the pubbies cave to amnesty there will be no contested states. 10 million new democrat voters have that effect in National elections. Republicans will still be able to win the house for a while because of the number of votes that the dems pull from urban precincts but that will go away as well. Call me a glass 1/32 full kind of guy but the takers, committed marxists and vaginacentric voters outnumber us.
Bingo. We ran another damned “gentleman” campaign. Makes me sick. We need people who run scorched-earth against the dems and expose them for what they truly are - communist totalitarians who want a very weak US vulnerable to our enemies. Dems in the 40s and 50s were serious commie-fighters and led the good fight. Dems of the 40s and 50s would be fighting today’s Dems as the communist enemies they really are.
Look, like many things in life, several foctors played into the results. The media likes to talk about the electorate as a monolith that made a singular decision. The reality is a combnination of reasons. If anything, Silver shows that Americans have a hard time firing incumbents; however, you can't discount some lack of enthusiasm for Romney as a possible reason in some voters mind. Fraud, bad GOTV etc all play into this on the margins as well...
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