Posted on 11/24/2012 6:29:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The last ballots in the presidential election were cast more than two weeks ago. But votes in 37 states, and the District of Columbia, are still being counted, with the results yet to be officially certified.
President Obama’s national margin over Mitt Romney has increased as additional ballots have been added to the tally. According to the terrific spreadsheet maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Mr. Obama now leads Mr. Romney by 3.3 percentage points nationally, up from 2.5 percentage points in the count just after the election.
Turnout has grown to about 127 million voters, down from roughly 131 million in 2008. The gap could close further as additional ballots are counted. The newly counted ballots have also shifted the relative order of the states.
Immediately after the election, it appeared that Colorado was what we called the “tipping-point state”: the one that gave Mr. Obama his decisive 270th electoral vote once you sort the states in order of most Democratic to least Democratic.
Mr. Obama’s margin in Colorado has expanded to 5.5 percentage points from 4.7 percentage points as more ballots have been counted, however. He now leads there by a wider margin than in Pennsylvania, where his margin is 5.0 percentage points. Neither state has certified its results, so the order could flip again, but if the results hold, then Pennsylvania, not Colorado, will have been the tipping-point state in the election.
Does this suggest that Mr. Romney’s campaign was smart to invest resources in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it might have been better served by contesting Pennsylvania throughout the campaign, rather than just at the last minute.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Pennsylvania alone would not have won the election for Mr. Romney. But if the national climate had been slightly better for him over all, he might have won Ohio and Florida. Winning Pennsylvania as well would have given Mr. Romney the Electoral College, even if he had lost Colorado, Virginia and the other swing states that Mr. Obama in fact carried.
These predictions are meaningless when one of the contestants is willing to use any and every illegal and immoral trick in the bag in order to win.
This past election was stolen. Period.
All of this “if the conservatives want to win, they need to become liberals”-type of analysis is merely after-the-fact propaganda.
Interesting.
Is that Silver's argument here?
I think if GOTV wasn’t crippled by ORCA, we could have won PA.
I still can’t believe how much of a disaster ORCA was. The Romney campaign would have been better off with strike lists.
Did anyone notice how the Walmart protest turned out? It seems that if you have to use actual bodies in place of rigged voting machines, there are a lot fewer leftists than appear to be voting.
I believe Pennsylvania should be contested — but not because Nate Silver says so. Nate Silver is the enemy.
Trying to put lipstick on a pig. He really ought to mention, as an esteemed political operative and statistician, the voting age population grew by probably 10 million, so that turnout is actually going to slip even more in a percentage basis. This means neither candidate was all that attractive. Furthermore,he really ought to be questioned whether Obama had given him the precinct quotas sent out to the community organizers to be met by any means necessary, allowing him to propagate the "turnout will be a lot like 2008" myth. Actually, measured against 2008, turnout was down substantially, so how did polls based on 2008 turnout perform so well?
The Republicans keep choosing idiots like Romney and we will lose. Very easy to see and prove. Dole, McCain, Romney are the worst people on Earth to choose. Oh well if the GOPe does not wake up, we will continue to lose.
You honestly believe Newt, Perry and/or Ric Santorum would be any better?
Could Herman Cain defeat Obama? Heck, he couldn’t even defeat Gloria Allred.
Ok. Just who was running on the GOP side who we should have chosen? Ron Paul? John Huntsman? Newt Gingrich? Rick Santorum?
No one else was really running. Of the above, I would have been supportive of Santorum, but all of them would have been weaker candidates than Romney. I’m sure at some point he would have self-destructed on the rape issues, as those GOP senatorial candidates did. There is a lot of noise about how many “moderates” would have supported Huntsman, but I don’t believe it for a minute—for every moderate we got, we would have lost 3 conservatives. Newt was good at debating, but had lots of baggage. And Ron Paul has more skeletons in his basement than John Wayne Gacy.
Ultimately, you are stuck with the people who are running. McCain was a very poor candidate, but I’m not sure if anyone could have beaten Obama in 2008 given how sour the electorate was on Bush and the adulation for “The One”.
The GOP needs to concentrate on eliminating the massive voter fraud organized and financed by the democrat party.
Until that happens they stand little chance of winning the presidency or senate.
Rick Santorum would have fought for it at least. Romney was a weak girly candidate who I knew was going to lose. He wanted the Presidency given to him without working for it. That is pretty much his whole life....easy. You can’t run for President that way. You have to work hard for it. Romney didn’t know that. He thought he was going to have voters come in flock for him just because...it doesn’t work that way as he learned big time on election day. He probably is still in shock over the ass kicking he got. lol.
RE: Rick Santorum would have fought for it at least.
I wonder, how he’s going to answer the abortion-in-case-of-rape question. He is VERY OPPOSED to abortion in ALMOST ALL circumstances.
I wonder, how he’s going to answer the abortion-in-case-of-rape question. He is VERY OPPOSED to abortion in ALMOST ALL circumstances.
Good. I guess telling the truth is a bad thing. Actually he would have turned the question into an economic answer which would have worked. The guy is the best of the best but conservatives are too liberal now adays....sadly.
Pennsylvania was lost (if we ever really had a shot at it) the moment the PA court overturned the Voter ID law a few weeks prior to the election. At that point you knew the Philly vote-fraud machine was going to manufacture the necessary turnout for Obama — which they did.
PA is a sucker play for Republicans.
You somehow forgot the bushes.
2004 56% turnout 122,239,000
2000 50% turnout 105,417,000
1996 49% turnout 96,275,000
1992 55% turnout 104,423,000
1988 50% turnout 91,594,000
1984 53% turnout 92,653,000
1980 53% turnout 86,509,000
1976 54% turnout 81,531,000
1972 55% turnout 77,744,000
1968 61% turnout 74,000,000
1964 62% turnout 70,639,000
1960 63% turnout 68,832,000
So, how did Pennsylvania vote again? How about that big wave of protest votes against Obama for his anti-coal policies? Thanks SeekAndFind.Forward!
Gleason's excuse for opposing the bill was the cockamamie theory that we could win all 20. Sure, and if we did, you'd be looking at a 330 plus electoral vote blowout nationwide where Pennsylvania would make NO difference. His reason is that the hand of the conservative wing of the GOP would have been strengthened and Gleason hates conservatives worse than Democrats.
With Democrats actually forced to compete for electoral votes in the marginal districts of Pennsylvania where they did not have fraud machines in place, they would have turned out fewer fake zombie voters in Philadelphia and possibly made the races down ticket far more competitive.
Agreed. No one but Romney could have made Obama sputter so during that first debate.
” Of the above, I would have been supportive of Santorum, but all of them would have been weaker candidates than Romney.”
Depends what kind of campaign you want to see waged. A true conservative candidate would at least argue ideas. Romney, McCain & Dole ran as managers of the social-welfare state.
Just hazarding a guess, but maybe he'd say that he'd rather punish the rapist than the baby.
A fun question to ask liberals who wave the "abortion-because-of-rape" signal flag is, "Do you believe in capital punishment for rapists?" Of course they don't believe in capital punishment for anyone. Then ask why they believe in capital punishment for an innocent baby.
All I see on threads like this is a bunch of navel lint gathering and lame arguments.
Coulda-shoulda-woulda...
Face it, we lost because we are no longer the majority.
Give-me-free-stuff voters and phoney compassion-made-for-television politicians are in the driver’s seat in this nation now.
We have FAR DEEPER problems than who we run. It’s really what we represent that voters are rejecting.
Sadly, I think you're correct. This is how every democracy has fallen throughout the ages.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
So did Bush #2, but people are now defining RINOs as candidates who lost and non-RINOs as candidates who won - if Bush had lost in 2000 he'd be included in the lists of "RINO candidates who lost."
And of course Reagan wasn't nearly the "true conservative" that people nostalgically idealize him to be, and in practice Nixon was the biggest RINO to ever walk the face of the earth.
Again, I like the things that Santorum said, but he would not have made a strong candidate at the national level. Romney was the best we had in the field and he lost. It is what it is.
And, BTW, you are right about managing the welfare state. But that is true of anyone (Republican or Democrat) who is elected these days. Real cuts to the welfare state would mean massive unrest and riots — anyone who is POTUS would have to contend with that. But the Liberal “solution” is to dramatically expand the Welfare state. That plays well to existing (and would be) clients and women. Logically, however, its an obvious formula for long term disaster.
The last President who could have reigned in the Welfare state was Bush II after 9/11—and he punted.
Sadly, I agree. It's simple demographics and we are now outnumbered. This is the entirely predictable result of nearly a half century of Great Society handouts and massive, unchecked Third World immigration.
We needed to fix this 30 years ago. Now it's a little too late. Oh well... Eventually the money will run out.
Without nationwide requirements for photo ID, all elections in this country are worthless and grounds for actions of extreme prejudice.
The "fight" Santorum brought would've been on the wrong battlefield and made things even worse.
I've said for years it was unlikely anyone would beat Obama because of the "historical nature" of his presidency. Romney did a fine job but considering the factors outside of his control including an electorate that still blames Bush for the economy, no Republican was likely to win against a personally popular incumbent.
That said, I'd have liked to have seen ORCA actually work. I doubt we'll see an investigation into whether the anarchists Anonymous really did sabotage it as they claimed.
Since you're prognosticating, have you picked someone for 2016?
Brilliant analysis using facts, figures and mathematical models. As opposed to declarations based on anecdotes and hearsay that you get here on FR....
“There is one additional complication for Republicans in Pennsylvania, however: it has often been a close-but-not-quite state for them. They can find 48 percent of its vote pretty easily, but finding 50 percent is difficult; Mr. Romney was hardly the first Republican to make a late play for the state but fail to win it.”
With Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, the Republicans could have turned the election around. As an aside, it looks like Virginia and Colorado may be slipping from the Pubbies’ grasp for now. Maybe, maybe not.
One thing is certain to me, however. That is, any strategy to reclaim these states must involve an effort to win more Euro-American votes, and specifically disregard the votes of Hispanics, blacks, Asians, etc.
Any effort to “win more Hispanics” to the Republican side will result in the following:
- a marginal increase in the number of Hispanics who actually vote for the Republicans, and,
- a significant drop-off of votes from conservatives who might have voted for the Republicans, but were driven away by “Hispandering” that warps and corrupts the conservative message.
You can’t gain the first without losing the second.
I see other approaches that will help Republicans in the future:
Electoral College reform — there are now 30 states controlled by Republican governors (and legislatures, in many of them). Let’s take Pennsylvania as a specific example. There is no way (at least right now) to physically separate the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas (democratic) from the rest of the state (Republican), but there are ways to make the Republican areas more competitive. That’s by changing the system by which PA’s electoral votes are apportioned from “winner-take-all” to “by Congressional district” (with the 2 Senate votes going to the popular vote winner). If this were done, Romney would probably have won 8 or 9 of PA’s 20 electoral votes, instead of losing all of them to Obama. Amazingly, the Pennsylvania legislature (controlled by Republicans) wanted to make this change last year (and the PA governor was willing to sign the bill). Who stopped the change? Why, the state Republican chairman, that’s who!
Election reform — this must be done in two ways:
1. Monitor and prevent fraud on election day, and
2. Change the “voting infrastructure” to the system that is most fraud-resistant
Republicans should create a state-by-state task force to identify areas within their states where attempts at fraud are likely, and then (on next election day) make no bones about enforcing integrity at the polls. This WILL NOT make Republicans popular in the target districts nor in the media. But they must do it anyway.
But this needs to go further (item 2). I believe that certain types of the “new voting equipment systems” may be more conducive to “hidden fraud” than are others. “Touch screen” voting machines and systems that leave no traceable “paper trail” are particularly suspect. We need a study of ALL voting infrastructure systems in use today, to ascertain which are most fraud-resistant, and then, we must push to convert all systems to this type (in states where we have the influence to make such changes).
Example: in my district in Connecticut (yes, a hopelessly blue state), voting is done by issuing the voter a blank paper ballot which is filled in with a marking pen (like taking a multiple-choice exam). The completed ballot is then personally taken by the voter and inserted into a standalone “scanner”, which reads and records the vote (and retains the paper ballot form). This leaves a verifiable “paper trail” of original ballots in the event of a recount. I consider this a relatively secure system (the voter can easily confirm his choices “on paper” before it’s recorded), HOWEVER, what is missing is some kind of “receipt” which can be issued (by request) to the voter as “proof of purchase”, so the voter can actually confirm that the scanner has read and _recorded_ his/her vote “as voted”.
We must push for such fraud-resistant systems wherever possible, in ALL voting districts within the states which we control.
If the Pubbies truly want “a path forward”, it must be via fundamental reforms such as these.
“Romney was a weak girly candidate who I knew was going to lose. He wanted the Presidency given to him without working for it. That is pretty much his whole life....easy. You can’t run for President that way. You have to work hard for it.”
Just as a point of order, how “hard” did Obama work for the position he holds today?
Just as a point of order, how “hard” did Obama work for the position he holds today?
Hard enough. He went from bombing the first debate to winning the next two. He campaigned throughout the year. Romney wasn’t seen for two weeks before the election and neither was Ryan.
Older, "rich", white, northeastern, liberal. The G.O.P.e. have not told me his name yet.
99% of the analytical post-mortems are saying the same thing, that if we want to win, we need to become them.
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