Free Republic

MUCH of the coverage of Tuesday’s results has focused on the strength of Barack Obama’s coalition — minorities, women and young voters. But that analysis misses the real point. The contours of the 2012 presidential race were shaped less by the country’s changing demographics than by the underlying attitudes and values of American voters, who are always far more complex than they appear to pollsters. The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation...

Over the next few days, I will cover a variety of issues I believe explain what happened in Ohio in 2012. The first issue starts at the very beginning of the process in Ohio. Now, it is always tricky to extrapolate primary data to general-election data, but I believe two data points, discussed below, from Ohio’s primary foreshadowed problems for Republicans and in the base with Governor Mitt Romney. First, in the 2008 fully contested Democratic primary between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, 2,386,945 Ohioans cast ballots. Remember, Ohio has open primaries where voters select either a Democratic...

I rarely post vanities, but I wanted to ask Freepers if they thought it would have made any difference to the average Obama voter if he had stated the same policy goals as Romney. My personal opinion is that for most Obama voters, and for much of the democrat base, it would make no difference. For that matter, I don't think they would have liked Romney any better even if he had run on Obama's platform. This is an important issue, because if its all about brand name, and not about actual policy positions, then there is essentially no way...

Talking about the election to many friends and family who had been rooting for Romney , I found their emotions ran the entire gamut from despair to despondency. Everybody was way down. I found myself unexpectedly blue as well. Our emotions were not so much caused by the Romney defeat. Few of us were particularly excited about him. It was the Obama victory that concerned us . . . . . . Yes, a little over half of the people who voted, a little over 60 million people, thought Obama deserved a second term. But about 59 million (the combined...

Much was made in the closing days of the election about the GOP's "Project ORCA", a Smartphone-linked network of volunteers who would enable the party to know who had voted in real time, allowing them to target their resources on election day to people and area who had NOT yet voted or had low turnout. It was a brilliant idea, and I know for a fact that when the Dems found out about it, there was some grave concern from a number of them. Well, here in Virginia my wife volunteered, participated in three training calls, plus online training -...

Butt first,a Public Service Announcement for the victims of Hurricane Sandy: (snip)I have a few more random thoughts on Big Guy’s reelection: Even though BO is the epitome of Jimmy Carter on steroids, and everything was shaping up for a Jimmy Carter style shellacking, the culture of the country has been so fundamentally transformed(snip)America’s ongoing commitment to fairness and diversity, the number of non-white voters hss tripled in the past 40 years; much of that due to changes in both our official and unofficial immigration policy. 1912 policy, 2012 policy The result of the change has been a huge upsurge...

Old Guard Fox Pundits who Manipulated our Primaries for the past 8 years - Thank you for your "service" - now disappear...

Obama supporters out celebrating his win on election night gathered on State Street Tuesday evening. I asked one man why he was celebrating Obama, and what that meant to him. He said, "It really means to me, no more Israel...Mitt Romney would go to war with Iran...Obama said f*** that sh*t. Kill those mother f***ers." Another said, "Palestine was there first, and Israel moved in in the 1940s and that's an unfair attack." A man of Jewish heritage accompanying him said, "I really do not think that us being with Israel is a good choice for us":(continued w/video)

Again, a rejection of a RINO who has a Youtube video of him bashing a coal-fired power plant, all the way to articles of him flip-flopping on practically any subject you can think of running as a conservative (and then losing in the general election), isn't tantamount to conservatism being over. Let's face it - Romney had a long track record of being a RINO. There are plenty of past threads here detailing his RINO past as governor, as well as his flip-flops before, during and after the primaries. Yet the GOP-e thought that putting up someone whom they said...

Conservatives need to take a collective breath and look closer at the numbers before they buy into the idea that GOP nominee Mitt Romney's defeat was due to some kind of national demographic shift that now makes Democrat presidential candidates' armor impenetrable. Before you give in to the hysteria, here are a few things to keep in mind. First, Barack Obama's re-election showing was actually pretty unimpressive for a guy whose philosophies voters have supposedly adopted. As of this writing on Wednesday, Obama's vote total stood at an unimpressive 60,119,958. That's about what John Kerry got in 2004 (59,028,444). President...

For the last two days I've been hearing conservatives decry "the death of the conservative movement" or "the end of the Republican Party," as well as a lot of other hyperbolic nonsense. Believe me: this happens every time a Democrat gets elected. And it happens every time a Republican gets elected on the other side. Passion is a great thing, but don't buy into all the crap. You lost an election; it happens and it's part of politics. What you should be thinking about is *how* you lost the election and how to win the next one. To figure that...

With the 2012 election results in, there are no short- or even medium-term "silver linings" for Republicans. SNIP SNIP On to why our pilot Mitt Romney and his plan were so flawed. 1. Paul Ryan. Romney's choice of Ryan was almost inexplicable. A good conservative, Ryan was unqualified for the job of vice president, and therefore the job of president. A sitting member of Congress, he held no leadership position on the Hill. Romney's VP selection was the most important one of his campaign, and by it he telegraphed his lack of political wisdom to the nation. With his VP...

Conservatives need to take a collective breath and look closer at the numbers before they buy into the idea that GOP nominee Mitt Romney's defeat was due to some kind of national demographic shift that now makes Democrat presidential candidates' armor impenetrable. Before you give in to the hysteria, here are a few things to keep in mind. First, Barack Obama's re-election showing was actually pretty unimpressive for a guy whose philosophies voters have supposedly adopted. As of this writing on Wednesday, Obama's vote total stood at an unimpressive 60,119,958. That's about what John Kerry got in 2004 (59,028,444). President...

‘In 2008, Obama rode the energy of hope and change into the White House,” says Andrew Bouchet, former national political director for Rick Santorum. “This year, he had no energy but he had spent the intervening years building an awesome Machine. Last night, he rode the Machine back into the White House.” The Machine indeed won. “Starting months ago, Democrats began spending $350 million building a get-out-the-vote infrastructure that swamped us,” Ed Rollins, who served as campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection bid, told me yesterday. “Then they demonized Romney in the swing states, and by the time he...

Newsmax Why Mitt Romney Lost Wednesday, November 7, 2012 02:24 PM By: Christopher Ruddy Newsmax Christopher Ruddy’s Perspective: It was the worst of times and the worst of times. With the 2012 election results in, there are no short- or even medium-term "silver linings" for Republicans. President Barack Obama has won a decisive victory and the GOP, expecting to gain Senate seats, actually had a net loss of three. The "morning after" will bring the expected explanations and after-game quarterbacking. Still, it is important that the GOP understand why we lost this one in hopes of future victory. Perhaps the...

So I'm sitting here today licking my wounds and wondering how in the hell I could be so wrong in my predictions for this election and suddenly it came to me. Just don't show up....Read on below

Columbus, Ohio — The realities of the electoral map meant that the Romney campaign really had no choice but to bet big on Ohio, and that bet was a loser. In addition to some critical on-the-ground specifics — Ohio is not hurting as badly as the rest of the country — there were three main reasons for that.1. Ohio likes crony capitalism. The automotive bailout is popular in Ohio, and not just among self-interested workers and investors in that industry. Putting General Motors on federal life support is economically daft and morally dubious, but it gave the Obama administration a powerful...

Obama moves states ever closer to his goal. Here we stand, we can do no other. Where we are, how we got here and where we are going next by no choice of our own:

I just did a quick lookup of the Obama vs McCain popular vote as compared to the Obama vs Romney Popular vote and here is what I see: Election 2008 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008 2008: Obama: 69,456,897 McCain: 59,934,814 TOTAL VOTES CAST: 129,391,711 Obama Victory Margin: 52.9% to 45.7% (9,522,083 votes) Obama: 365 EV McCain: 173 EV _______________________ Election 2012 Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-election-results 2012: Obama: 60,652,149 Romney: 57,810,390 TOTAL VOTES CAST: 118,462,539 (2,841,759 votes) Obama Victory Margin: 51.2% to 48.8% Assuming Obama takes Florida (which as of this writing is still uncalled)... Obama: 332 EV Romney: 206 EV ___________________ What I find interesting...

Take a look at the historical perspective. An incumbent winning re-election almost always happens. It is expected. It is like a tennis player holding serve. Since WWII, the POTUS has changed parties like clockwork every eight years. The only exception was that Reagan essentially got three terms (Bush 41 basically being just a continuation) by taking one from Carter. Other than that the pattern is unblemished. So the real story of yesterday is just how close the Democrats came to blowing it. In every single other instance the party in power increased their margin of victory running for re-election. LBJ...