[nathanbedford]

If this really was a get out the vote election, you suggest the Democrats contrived a blend of technology and human contact which was unbelievably effective, even though Obama was 9-10 million votes short of is 2008 effort. I say it was unbelievably effective because considering his record and the state of the economy it is unbelievable that he could get any voters out at all.

I think the technology part is relatively simple to duplicate and it is Romney's failure that as a CEO he failed to test drive the technology sold to him by his consultants. But the interesting component, the human side, is the most difficult to organize and manage.

I suspect, but I do not know, that this was accomplished along primarily racial and gender lines. In other words, blacks got out the black vote, Hispanics got the Hispanic vote, coeds got out the college vote etc. My guess is that the Obama operation sought to bind the potential voter to the campaign not by talking so much about the issues but by group identity. The whole idea was that the potential voter gains peer acceptance by joining and conforming to the group. Considering the kind of voters Obama sought, this was a fruitful enterprise. It is easy to see black with black bonding in concentrated ghetto areas but one can also understand the interaction in the University towns.

This process of peer acceptance does away almost entirely with the need to be right on the issues, one need merely recite a few shibboleths and the issue is foreclosed. The bonding is not intellectual and rational but emotional and can easily be irrational.

This is purest speculation on my part but I think it would go a long way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable to the conservative mind.

What do you think?

[jackmercer]

I think you could be right on both counts, certainly on the first. The fundamentals alone should have resulted in a Romney and republican congressional landslide, but Obama squeaked it out with feet on the pavement.

The second part very likely played a role given the nature of unregistered voters. They are low information voters and therefore very susceptible to group think and the theory of truth by authority, i.e., if this is a person with whom I can identify and feel comfortable with and cares for me says something, it must be right. Kind of how we all inherit the religion and politics of our parents until we are old enough to differtiate intellectually or confirm through own experience that they were right. Then they find those around them with the same views and it becomes solid like cement.

[muleskinner]

Obama had over 200,000 precinct workers (SEIU, Autoworkers, etc) in the battleground states starting just after the 2010 elections. The 2010 elections was the lib/left wake-up call. Romney had 25,000. No army won a war with those numbers. Maybe a battle, but not a war.

Obama had a 6 month head start on advertising and carpetbombed Romney in Ohio. The Romney campaign couldn't answer until after the convention, but a Republican SuperPac could. Why it didn't? Poor coordination?

[Utmost Certainty]

Most of these effects are relatively easy to do with rudimentary knowledge of sociology and interpersonal group behavior. There’s really nothing incredibly groundbreaking about what the Ds are doing in concept, it’s just that Rs aren’t doing it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics#Intragroup_dynamics

Also relevant albeit of a more extreme variation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism

The bit about thought-terminating clichés is revealing:

A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

Lifton said: “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”