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Obama’s top election strategist tells a Chicago audience he was surprised Mitt Romney’s team did not attack Obama more, stuck so narrowly with their base—and chose Paul Ryan for VP. President Obama’s top reelection strategist conceded surprise Monday that Republican super PACS didn’t attack Obama far earlier, Mitt Romney didn’t invest much more in ground operations, and that the Republican nominee played narrowly to the party base in picking Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Offering a lengthy dissection of the campaign, David Axelrod told a Chicago audience that he was “a bit surprised that super PACS, which spent...

Vote counts, comparisons to prior races and other stats? I am helping a college kid with a project and cannot find a good compendium of the recent election. Help!

The electoral fraud evidence is accumulating to the point where I must conclude that the November election was stolen by the Democrats. In the months leading up to the election, report after report surfaced highlighting significant erosion of support for President Obama.

If you want to understand why President Obama was reelected despite a largely unsuccessful presidency and almost unprecedentedly high and continuous unemployment, just look at the Cuban-American vote. In fact, if you want to understand America today — specifically, why it is in decline — just look at the Cuban-American vote. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The president captured 48% of the Cuban-American vote in Florida — a record high for a Democrat.” Democratic presidential nominees went from 25 percent of the Cuban-American vote in 2000, to 29 percent in 2004, to 35 percent in 2008, to 48...

Over the last three weeks, I think I have read most of the post-election op-eds written on the Latino vote. I have studied exit polling, read sophisticated demographic analyses, and talked to as many Latinos in my hometown as I could. The result is that I would not advise Republicans to go down the identity-politics route. I don’t wish to live in an America where Steve Lara or Bob Martinez is reduced to an anonymous “Latino” and Victor Hanson is just a “white male.” But if Republicans really believe there is a monolithic Latino vote, and if those of Hispanic...

The dust may still be settling on the 2012 election, but there is good reason for conservatives to find optimism for the future. Recently, I found such hope reviewing the full exit poll data from our recent election. The bottom line on the presidential race was this: Mitt Romney lost the election because voters liked him less than Barack Obama. Despite claims otherwise, the election was not a referendum on Obama’s record or even red state values versus blue state values. Obama and the Democrats have claimed a “mandate,” but the data shows voters actually oppose President Obama’s programs like...

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign's big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. When the campaign needed it most, Orca was beached. Politico has an excellent summary of the problems it says that Orca had. Among them were that the Romney campaign kept it secret and didn't beta-test it before it was rolled out on Election Day. That meant that the people who it was designed for -- the thousands of volunteers across the country -- didn't have a chance to learn how...

By ALEXANDER BURNS | 11/26/12 10:54 AM EST Via Hohmann, the Des Moines Register reports on the huge sums both presidential campaigns spent in the last weeks of the 2012 race -- and OFA's consistent advantage on the air in spite of Romney's money: "Together, the campaigns and their allies averaged nearly $1 million a day in new TV spending in swing-state Iowa from Oct. 1 to Election Day. Several polls in the frenzied final weeks had shown a neck-and-neck battle in Iowa. Romney and the outside groups backing him spent $21.5 million in the final five weeks, essentially matching...

Many pollsters predicted a Romney win, but were proven wrong on Election Day 2012. Did pollsters fail to account for cellphone users, or did Romney fail at turning out the GOP vote? Did voter fraud play a role? Find out as Michael Barone analyzes the results of the 2012 election with Glenn Reynolds.

A forensic profiler whose previous cases have included the Natalie Holloway disappearance and the O.J. Simpson double murder says Barack Obama is confessing to stealing the 2012 president election. “Obama appears to unconsciously confess on multiple occasions that in his secret fury he stole the 2012 presidential election – continuing his attacks on our nation,” Andrew G. Hodges, M.D., told WND in an assessment of Obama.

In many aspects of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney and the establishment Republicans who were running his campaign just plain got outgunned and outsmarted. Yet, in the aftermath of Romney’s defeat, he said he lost because he couldn’t overcome the effect of Obama’s “gifts” to key demographics: student loan modifications for young voters and amnesty for young and predominantly Hispanic illegal aliens. We think Romney missed the mark with that analysis because conservative ideas have successfully countered the Democrats’ attempts to bribe voters in the past. To avoid the kind of defeat Republicans suffered in 2012, conservatives must learn...

If I had to choose one word to describe the 2012 presidential election, it would be decline. The results showed a decline in overall turnout, a decline in the GOP coalition relative to its 2004 high, a decline in the Democratic coalition relative to its 2008 high, and in general a stark decline in public confidence that the nation’s leaders can fix its pressing problems. Just look at the results. In 2008, some 131.5 million Americans went to the polls; while the votes are still being tallied, this time around there probably were between 127 and 130 million votes cast....

In an article referenced by Scott earlier today, Byron York shows that Mitt Romney did not lose the election because of his failure to win the Hispanic vote. Romnwy would have lost in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire even if he had gained a large portion of the Hispanic votes in these key battleground states.York also demonstrates that, as we have argued, Hispanics are not a natural Republican constituency. If anything, they are natural Democrats for reasons unrelated to the immigration issue. Exit poll information suggests that Hispanics based their votes on a number of issues beyond...

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard Jay Cost undertakes a retrospective on what happened in the election just passed. Cost detects a mystery. It’s the case of the missing voters: ******** In 2008, some 131.5 million Americans went to the polls; while the votes are still being tallied, this time around there probably were between 127 and 130 million votes cast. Most of the decline came from white voters; in fact, between 6 and 9 million white voters went missing this year, relative to 2008. It is a reasonable guess that the number of white votes in 2004...

Speaking at The David Horowitz Freedom Center's "Restoration Weekend" in Florida on November 16, Pat Caddell indicted what he called the Republican "consultant-lobbyist-establishment" complex for losing a presidential campaign in 2012 President Barack Obama had no business winning. “No presidential campaign should be run by consultants,” Caddell said. “They should be run by people who are committed to the candidate and not into making big money.” Caddell said “Republicans never attempted to put a frame around the national election” because “the people who run the messaging in the Republican party and their consultants refused to do it.” Caddell, the former...

I am incredibly steamed this Thanksgiving Holiday over what the Democrats are doing to my country. Everybody by now knows—or should know—how readily Democrats conduct election fraud, and how determined they are to defend it. James O’Keefe and others have taken videos of paid Democratic operatives encouraging citizens to vote twice. O’Keefe was even able to claim Attorney General Eric Holder’s own ballot at a district polling place by claiming to be him, and then to vote in his place. … But even knowing this, I was not prepared for a conversation I had at Thanksgiving dinner with my brother-in-law,...

This will boggle your mind. Barack Obama lost independent voters to Mitt Romney in every swing state except North Carolina and still won reelection. President Barack Obama won a second term by taking the majority of swing states. But a closer look at exit polling data shows Obama lost the independent vote in most of those states over the last four years. Independents, who do not align with one political party or another, make up a fast-growing and coveted voting bloc.

The Catholic Church — a politically and ethnically sprawling institution — has no natural home on the American ideological spectrum. Neither major party combines moral conservatism with a passion for social justice. So Catholic leaders have often challenged Democrats to be more pro-life and Republicans to be more concerned about immigrants and the poor. But President Obama’s first term was a period of unexpected aggression against the rights of religious institutions. His Justice Department, in the Hosanna-Tabor case, argued against the existence of any “ministerial exception” to employment rules. Obama tried to mandate that Catholic schools, hospitals and charities offer...

Disbelief is the word that defines the Republican state of mind in the wake of the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama. The obvious questions are: “How can Americans have re-elected a president who has presided over an economy where unemployment still hovers at 8 percent ?” And, “How can Americans have re-elected a president who still doesn’t grasp that his big government policies are what have blocked our economic recovery?” The Republican Party needs to take responsibility for this disaster. Nothing in the outcome of this election is a surprise. The realities which produced these election results have been...

When President Obama took the stage at McCormick Place in Chicago well after midnight, we were all too wiped out with joy or depression or Nate Silver auto-refresh fatigue to pay careful attention to the speech the newly reelected president delivered. The phrase that lingered in most of our sleepy ears was the reprise of his career-launching invocation of the United States as being more than red and blue states. So soaring, so unifying. But those words were merely the trappings of magnanimity draped over an argument that was, at its core, harsher than the one he had regularly delivered...