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There were two big shocks for me on election night 2012: 1) Obama beat Romney. I had concluded that 2012 would look a lot like 2004, i.e. a 50-49 victory with about 290 Electoral votes. I did not subscribe to the landslide (i.e. Dick Morris) but did see a narrow Romney victory! 2) All of the talk about the "hispano" vote. I had looked at anecdotal evidence and did not see a "hispano" wave on election day. So I was surprised with all of the conventional wisdom that "hispanos" had reelected Obama. It turns out that "hispanos" did not really...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would have won the presidency if the white and black turnout rates had stayed at their 2004 levels, according to a new analysis of 2012 election. “The battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same,” according to The Associated Press’s summary of research by William Frey, an expert at the Brookings Institution. Overall turnout declined from 62 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2012, Frey reported. The drop-off reduced the overall turnout by...

WASHINGTON (AP) — America's blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home. Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/In-a-first-black-voter-turnout-rate-passes-whites-4470090.php#ixzz2RoVrhiJ5

America's blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home. Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible...

PolitiChicks Ann-Marie Murrell and Morgan Brittany interview best-selling author C. Edmund Wright, who wrote of “WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again”. [video at link]

Since the 2012 elections, there’s been an extended debate over the strength of the current Democratic majority and the future viability of the Republican Party. I’ve long argued that these postmortems are overwrought, and nothing about the results altered that. After all, the demographic changes in that election were more attributable to a surprisingly large number of white voters staying home (fewer whites voted last year than in 2004, despite steady growth in absolute numbers) than to any rapid growth in minority votes. The GOP performed about as well in November as we would have expected given the state of the...

Ed Morrisseyflagged this Politico piece earlier but I want to pay special attention to Huck's comments. Gabe Malor called BS on them on Twitter this morning. I think he's right. Huckabee's latest shot across the party establishment's bow: “The last two presidential elections, we had more moderate candidates, so if anything a lot of conservatives went to the polls reluctantly or just didn’t go at all,” said Huckabee in a separate interview. “If all of the evangelicals had showed up, it may have made a difference.”…Huckabee, like Santorum, was a bit incredulous at the attempt to fault social conservatives when...

The report ranks the most and least “Bible-minded” cities by looking at how people in those cities view the Bible.... Regionally, the South still qualifies as the most Bible-minded. The top ranking cities, where at least half of the population qualifies as Bible-minded, are all Southern cities. This includes the media markets for Knoxville, TN (52% of the population are Bible-minded), Shreveport, LA (52%), Chattanooga, TN (52%), Birmingham, AL (50%), and Jackson, MS (50%). Other markets in the top 10 include Springfield, MO (49%), Charlotte, NC (48%), Lynchburg, VA (48%), Huntsville-Decatur, AL (48%), and Charleston, WV (47%). The least Bible-oriented...

, the brain trust in Chicago was also obsessed with superstitions, particularly after the president’s disastrous performance in Denver at the first debate. As Thrush and Martin report, the unlikely ringleader of the “superstitious obsessive-compulsive disorder” was the uber-rational David Plouffe. Here are some fun tidbits they dug up about the guidelines the Obama camp followed before the second debate: No Thai food, because that’s what the team ate before the Denver debate. No one can wear the same clothes they wore before Denver. No one can follow the same exercise routine. (“If you had gone for a jog thirteen...

It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his “better ground game,” could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is “unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,” the memo said. But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called “state of the art” crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day. To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.

Exclusive: Molotov Mitchell says 'the computers are taking over!' Molotov Mitchell is president of the award-winning Illuminati Pictures. His specialty is entertainment communications, particularly reaching the "under 40" demographic.

"Overwhelming evidence shows vote fraud, abuse played major role in outcome Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/did-obama-steal-the-2012-election/#IucGe1EBe2cW55XF.99 "WASHINGTON — Following Barack Obama’s re-election, accusations from some quarters have held that his campaign stole the election through vote fraud. Others claim no vote fraud occurred, and that the election victory resulted from the Obama campaign’s vastly superior get-out-the-vote effort. One RedState diarist has even gone so far as to announce that commenters complaining that the election was stolen will be banned from the site. With all of the swirling allegations, where does the truth lie? While there have been many proven cases of...

The election of 2012 fused principles of state and church demanding Americans follow one distinct path. The country chose to follow a path that is fiscally illogical, covetous of private property, dismissive to personal initiative, mythological towards freedom, repentant to a planet, subjugating of the religious to the secular, deadly to the unborn, disrespectful to the sick and aged, encouraging to the sexually deviant, and destructive to family. So how could our nation, so strongly and freely steeped in Judeo-Christian principles, have chosen such a path willingly? First, let us quickly address the Judeo portion of our heritage. Quite simply,...

The Romney campaign spent an estimated $356 million between January 1, 2011 and October 17, 2012 in its unsuccessful effort to defeat incumbent President Barack Obama. According to Federal Election Commission documents, as reported by OpenSecrets.org, $33 million of this amount was paid to two consulting firms with ties to key staffers at both the Romney campaign and the RNC. Targeted Victory LLC, a Minnesota company with executive offices in Virginia, was paid $17 million for digital communications by the Romney campaign. FLS Connect LLC, an Arizona corporation with headquarters in Minnesota, was paid $16 million for voter contact and...

...as we close the book on the election, it bears noting that another less obvious bloc of key swing state voters helped the president win a second term. They're the "nones" — that's the Pew Research Center's shorthand for the growing number of American voters who don't have a specific religious affiliation. Some are agnostic, some atheist, but more than half define themselves as either "religious" or "spiritual but not religious," Pew found in a recent survey. They are typically younger, more socially liberal than their forebears, vote Democratic, and now make up nearly 20 percent of the country's population....

Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president this year, received the lowest level of support among evangelicals of any Republican presidential candidate since Bob Dole in 1996, according to a report by Barna Group, a Christian polling organization. Romney received the support of 81 percent of evangelicals, compared to 88 percent for John McCain in 2008, and 83 percent and 85 percent, respectively, for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Only Dole received a lower level of evangelical support at 74 percent in Barna's polling. Barna's results differ from other polls showing Romney received a higher proportion of the...

AMERICA NEARS EL TIPPING POINTO December 5, 2012 Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services355 I apologize to America's young people, whose dashed dreams and dim employment prospects I had laughed at, believing these to be a direct result of their voting for Obama. On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. According to Pew Research, 54 percent of white voters under 30 voted for Romney and only 41 percent for Obama. That's the same percentage Reagan got from the entire white population in 1980....

... The big deal is that when Steve Schmidt and Mike Murphy sit down on the sets of liberal television shows and bash Rush Limbaugh and what Schmidt calls "the conservative entertainment complex" -- meaning talk radio and Fox News -- they wind up sharply illustrating the GOP's real problem. The real problem is people like Schmidt and Murphy. The real problem is the fact they and so many GOP others make their well-paid livings catering to exactly what the "conservative entertainment complex" spends all of its time fighting: the "political consultant-big government complex." Schmidt and Murphy are the political...

The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants. The only major cities that voted Republican in the 2012...

It may take election experts years to unravel the mystery of why Mitt Romney was convinced he had won the 2012 presidential election, as a new report shows some skewed internal poll numbers, and explains Romney’s two trips to Pennsylvania. But at the same time, the article from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber shows inconsistencies with reports from November 5 and November 6 about the numbers that might have convinced Romney and his team that he had a good chance of beating President Obama in Ohio. Obama’s resounding win is starting to take on more of a resemblance to Harry...