Free Republic

The Gallup Poll’s misfire in the 2012 election was caused by a variety of defects in the way the firm conducts surveys, according to the organization’s top pollster, who provided the most detailed explanation to date of how the firm plans to improve their polling accuracy in future elections. The four factors he listed: 1. Likely voter model shifted too far toward Romney While most likely voter models improved Romney’s 2012 standing, Gallup’s resulted in a larger-than-average four-point shift. In particular, the finding mirrors problems in the 2008 New Hampshire primary, when Gallup’s likely voter model produced larger errors than...

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...

On talk radio, in internet commentary and at right wing conferences, worried analysts and activists obsess over the dire electoral consequence of "three million missing Republicans" who doomed conservative chances in 2012. This lament for the lost legions of conservatism has been relentlessly recycled in right-leaning media to prove that Mitt Romney failed to mobilize his base with his inept, uninspired campaign. The commonly cited proof for this conclusion is that Mitt Romney received even fewer votes than did the hapless McCain-Palin ticket. If only the GOP had run with a "true conservative" instead of another flip-flopping RINO, the true-believers...

White and Hispanic turnout fell from 2004 to 2012, according to a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies based on newly-released U.S. Census data. Had turnout equaled what it was in 2004, 4.7 million more whites would have voted in 2012, of which 4.2 million were not college graduates, according to the study. Obama received five million more votes than Romney. “As Republicans think about how they can expand their voter base, the new data suggest that one of their biggest problems in the last presidential election was that so many less-educated whites sat home,” said Steven Camarota,...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.) issued the following statement: The fact that Americans were targeted by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable. The Committee will aggressively follow up on the IG report and hold responsible officials accountable for this political retaliation.

A new Census Bureau report shows a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites voted in a presidential election for the first time in history last year during the matchup between President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney. The report, released Wednesday, found that more than 66% of eligible blacks voted in the presidential contest. Only 64.1% of whites turned out to vote. This marks the first time since 1968 that blacks turned out at a higher rate the whites. In addition to blacks turning out at a higher rate, the number of Asian and Hispanic voters grew from 2008 to...

May 9, 2013 Report: RNC scrapped pre-election Benghazi ad; Conservatives demand to know why Twitchy Staff Did the RNC make a big mistake last fall? A new report by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has many conservatives seeing red. Johnatha Karl, ABC News, reports that this ad was put together by the RNC last fall but was “scrapped at the last minute because of objections from the Romney campaign, which was concerned the ad would distract from Romney’s efforts to focus on the economy.” Regardless of whether or not the Romney campaign actually played a role in the RNC’s final decision,...

“No single mistake cost Mitt Romney the presidency,” former Romney advisor Gabriel Schoenfeld writes in the opening page of a tell-all book centered on one mistake on a single day in the 2012 campaign: The Republican’s hasty and flawed reaction to the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. But Schoenfeld argues nonetheless that Romney’s inability to respond cogently to the Benghazi attack was a key component of his defeat. “A man celebrated for his management prowess delegated an immense mount of decision-making power to individuals who failed to carry out successfully that and other basic functions,” writes Schoenfeld, who held 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...

(9:49 long) Stu Stevens' take on "so-called" media bias and Romney's 2012 campaign.

NEW YORK — The reporter for Mother Jones magazine who broke the story of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's remarks that 47 percent of Americans "believe they are victims" is among the winners of the 64th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism. David Corn, Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief, received the political reporting prize for his work, which shook up the campaign when he reported on the remarks in September.

The New York Times stats whiz says he'll stop blogging if his poll analysis sways future contestsNate Silver was vilified by some Republicans and political journalists during the 2012 election, and embraced by Democrats looking for a fix of reassuring political news during rocky periods of President Obama's re-election bid. This week, the seemingly prophetic New York Times–employed political polling aggregator told an audience of students at Washington University in St. Louis that "the polls can certainly affect elections at times." They're not supposed to, Silver added, but some voters may "take the forecasts too seriously." Then, says Michael Tabb...

How the Republican candidate lost the presidential election. < snip > ..... [Republicans] are concocting explanations and excuses for what they see as Mitt Romney's snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They should realize that it was economics that sank Romney. His crucial problem was his campaign's failure to make a sufficiently convincing case on the money issues. Most postmortems have focused on the demographics of the defeat. ..... < snip > But none of Romney's demographic defeats are as significant as the electoral potential Romney missed on money issues. Election Day exit polling by Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International...

On Tuesday, David Freddoso, author of Spin Masters, How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Reelect Barack Obama, joined the hosts of Fox & Friends to discuss pro-Democratic media bias in 2012 and beyond. The author detailed the case against the media in this interview and in a recent column for the New York Post in which he quotes a political scientist who attributes much of the nation’s support for Democratic politicians to the pro-Democratic coverage of politics in the mainstream media. Without that biased media, the author and the political scientist say, the nation’s voting patterns would...

Mitt Romney promised that he won’t vanish from politics during a meeting in Washington Friday morning with a group of former campaign donors and aides. Two people at the meeting told Politico that Romney said he will help Republican candidates in upcoming elections.

President Obama is beginning his second term today, and while Democrats are celebrating, there are some Republicans and conservatives who are viewing the festivities with more than the usual regret. Until just after the November election, they were among the 300 Washington-based members of Mitt Romney’s transition team, known internally as the “Readiness Project.” No, hiring such a large staff to prepare plans for a Romney presidency didn’t represent an egotistical measuring of the drapes by the candidate. It was mandated by a new federal law, the Presidential Transition Act, which a Democratic Congress passed in 2010 to ensure that...

From childhood it has been my nature to find that double rainbow in even the worst adversity I've experienced throughout my life, and like so many of you I've had my share. As an adult I am now well conditioned to find it immediately -- as I've learned that to do so I'm able to overcome a setback much quicker, press forward -- come what may. (Of note, this usually accompanies a very fast turn to Christ as part of the process.) But on occasion, life's disappointments refuse to allow such expediency and we are compelled to pause briefly...

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.

Mitt Romney’s son says that his defeated dad never actually wanted the top job and he was reluctantly convinced to run for president. “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to… run,” the eldest Romney son Tagg said in an interview with the Boston Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place… he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he...

alerie Jarrett Pushed Away from Obama Toward End of Campaign Daniel Halper December 17, 2012 11:42 AM During the tail-end of the presidential campaign, Valerie Jarrett, a close aide to Barack Obama, was pushed away from the president. The news of the conflict is reported in a new Politico e-book, which came out today. "Obama adviser Jarrett — a close friend of the First Family but an unpopular figure with much of the president’s staff — was irritated with the debate prep team after the Denver debacle. Another adviser said she made it clear 'the team, and not just the...

Many Single Women, A Key Bloc, Are Avoiding GOP By By NICHOLAS RICCARDI DENVER (AP) — Sara Stevenson spends her working hours surrounded by Republicans, namely the married men who work alongside her in a Denver oil and gas firm company. But after hours and on weekends, she usually spends her time with other single women, and there's not a Republican in sight among the bunch. "There was just no way I could have supported any Republican this year," said Stevenson, 31. "They skew so much to the religious right. ... They focused so much on taxes. It's not something...

"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 Republican Party and stupid statements by some candidates are to blame for GOP losses in last month’s congressional elections, the former leader of a tea party group said Monday. Dick Armey, who until recently led the conservative group FreedomWorks, said some GOP candidates said “stupid things” that party leaders should have taught them to avoid saying. He said Republicans had a lot of candidates who did “dumb things” during their campaigns. Armey, a former Republican House majority leader from Texas, did not specifically mention controversial comments about rape by GOP Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri that contributed to...

Many Republicans seem ready to agree to Obama's demands for tax increases -- after all, elections have consequences, and he won, right? Maybe, but before agreeing to anything, the GOP should probably look a little more carefully at just who elected Obama. Dr. Robert Vanderbei, a professor of Operations Research at Princeton, developed the visualization shown above by combining Democrat blue with GOP red according to popular vote proportions taken at the county level and printing the result as a 3D map in which apparent vertical height is a stand-in for the number of voters counted.Nationally, Obama won the popular...

Failed campaign: Mitt Romney's staff found that he lost an 'extraordinary' number of white, male votes during the election - traditionally key supporters of the Republican party And in another blow, Romney’s own campaign manager also admitted that his infamous 47 per cent comment was ‘the epitome of low during the campaign’ - from which they never recovered. California as he reflects upon what went wrong. Now Neil Newhouse, his campaign pollster, has begun to sift through the data to determine what the key factors were. He said that he had to give ‘credit’ to the Obama campaign for getting...

Carlos Gutierrez, adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Sunday he was “shocked” by Romney’s comments this week on minorities.“I think we lost the election because the far right of this party has taken the party to a place that it doesn’t belong.”Ugh.CNN reported: In an interview set to air in full Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley, Gutierrez also sharply criticized Romney’s remarks made on a call Wednesday with donors following his loss in last week’s election. Romney explained his loss in part by pointing to “gifts” President Barack Obama gave to certain groups...

SAN DIEGO — The man who planned to be president wakes up each morning now without a plan. Mitt Romney looks out the windows of his beach house here in La Jolla...He devours news from 2,600 miles away in Washington about the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, shaking his head and wondering what if. Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There's no aide to make his peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and emailing his CEO buddies, who've been swooping in and out of La...

For over seventy years, white blue-collar Catholics who have lived and worked in America’s once great industrial states were the voting bloc that provided the margins of victory for Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes. The 2012 election results, however, indicate these Catholics no longer have that kind of clout at the ballot box.Why? First of all, they are an aging group whose numbers are declining every year. About 650 Catholic World War II and Korean War veterans die every day. That translates into 950,000 in the last four years. Add spouses and the number...

The GOP establishment and some conservative pundits, such as Ann Coulter, are in full defense mode, claiming that Romney is not responsible for losing to an incumbent responsible for perhaps the most damaging fiscal crises in our nation’s history. Don’t believe it. Romney IS responsible for wasting a billion dollars to carry out an issue-free campaign full of simple-minded platitudes. Indeed, Coulter is leading the charge with her recent column titled, Don’t Blame Romney. It’s sweet to watch Coulter defend her darling Romney, but let’s get real. The reality is that Romney was one of the worst GOP presidential candidates...

Filling in on Rush Limbaugh’s Monday radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said that Republicans lost big on Election Day because less engaged and more uniformed voters turned out in force. “We do very well in off years, in the midterms — 1994, 2002,” Steyn said. “Republicans can have good years then because essentially they’re low-turnout elections — people who are engaged in politics vote. In the presidential years, people voted — a broader pool of voters comes in, and they’re basically people who swim in the broader culture. They’re not people who know the name of their congressmen...

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...

November 22, 2012 The GOP Turnout Myth To win future elections, Republicans will need more than better get-out-the-vote software. By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL To win the next presidential race, the GOP will have to understand what went wrong in 2012. To do that, they've got to come to grips with what did, and did not, happen with turnout. Even as Republicans have engaged in some agonizing over their candidate and agenda, many have sought comfort in the notion that a big part of the loss came down to simple mechanics. President Obama had a stunning Election Day operation, which turned...

Small minds always leap to the answers given the last time around, which is probably why Maxine Waters keeps getting re-elected. But the last time is not necessarily the same as this time. A terrorist attack is not the same as the Cold War, a war in Afghanistan is not the same as a war in Iraq, and Mitt Romney is not the same as John McCain or Bob Dole. But since the election, many conservatives seem to be coalescing around the explanation for our defeat given by Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, who said: “What we...

Romney: 60,099,431 McCain: 59,948,323 Obama 2012: 64,185,237 Obama 2008: 69,498,516

"Barack Obama won because he recognized a new America." Or maybe an America more fluid, more insubstantial than post-election wisdom is ready to grant. You can't always tell about "new" -- a truth the human race rarely acknowledges. We'll see whether James Carville's and Stan Greenberg's words from a Democracy Corps survey stand up better than the consensus of November 1965, following the Lyndon Johnson-led slaughter of almost every Republican downwind from Barry Goldwater. Johnson, father of the Great Society, was all but run out of Washington on a rail after mucking up the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, as everyone these...

In this election the Republican Party ran two wholly inoffensive blue state Republicans on a platform of jobs at a time when the economy was everyone’s chief concern and the incumbent had absolutely failed to fix the economy. And they lost. The Monday — or Wednesday — morning quarterbacks will have a fine time debating what Mitt Romney should have done differently. The red Republicans will say that he should have been more aggressive and should have hit Obama on Benghazi. The blue Republicans will blame a lack of outreach to Latinos. Some will blame Sandy, others will blame Christie...

The 2012 election was an open door for the GOP to lead America back to its roots in faith and morality, and the Republicans were AWOL, says Dr. James Dobson, founder of Family Talk and a brand new political outreach arm called Family Talk Action. “I waited throughout the campaign for Mitt Romney to declare himself, to at least identify with the moral issues that are before us. He would not touch them,” Dobson said on a two-part radio program in which Penny Nance, head of Concerned Women for America, joined.

By KEVIN ROBILLARD | 11/16/12 4:38 PM EST Sen.-elect Ted Cruz believes Mitt Romney got a little too close to Barack Obama in the third presidential debate. “I’m pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama,” Cruz said in a speech at the Federalist Society’s annual conference Friday. Cruz said that conservatives failed to make their case to the American people, leaving Romney no choice but to move toward the president. “We didn’t win the argument, we didn’t even make the argument” throughout much of 2012, Cruz said. But in the first debate, he argued, that changed. “It was the...

Despite Gov. Rick Scott’s seven-hour waiting lines in Florida’s minority voting precincts, President Obama won the state’s 29 electoral votes, giving him a 332-206 victory and, more important, a clear mandate to lead America forward. Just two weeks ago, Republicans were told by Fox News’ resident genius Dick Morris the election was in the bag. So, what happened? David Frum may have the answer. “The problem with Republican leaders is that they’re cowards, not that they’re fundamentally mistaken,” said the conservative pundit and former George W. Bush speechwriter. “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday added his name to a growing list of Republicans who are rebuking Mitt Romney over his “gifts” comments. “You can't expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive,” said Christie on MSNBC’s Morning Joe when asked if he agreed with fellow Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who was one of the first to criticize the former GOP nominee over the comments. In a conference call with donors Wednesday, Romney said that minorities and young people voted for Obama because he offered them “gifts.” Said Christie: “You have to...

Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss to President Obama was a disappointing result that neither he nor his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term. Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students...

Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal: And though I have my anxieties about the president's next term, I also have a hunch the GOP dodged a bullet with Mr. Romney's loss. ... the GOP dodged ownership of the second great recession, which will inevitably hit when the Federal Reserve can no longer float the economy in pools of free money. When that happens, Barack Obama won't have George W. Bush to kick around. Stephens's point -- that the wreckage of the past four years now belongs to Obama -- resonates in light of current events: The stock market...

In an article published in 2001, Jude Wanniski, the author of The Way the World Works, noted that since 1896, only Republican presidential candidates running on “pro-growth” platforms have won. Republicans advocating “austerity” have invariably lost. With the defeat of Mitt Romney, the election of 2012 continued this pattern, with one addition. Republican presidential candidates offering clueless confusion also lose. Democracies tend to evolve two political parties, a party of economic growth and a party of income redistribution. If a credible plan for economic growth is offered, the people will vote for it, provided that it does not involve crushing...

***SNIP*** [L]et's be honest. We had little reason to believe that Romney was truly dedicated to improving our social and cultural conditions -- indeed, that all-important thing called the human condition -- because he talked endlessly about his business experience. Most Americans don't like their bosses and have trouble with landlords and creditors. Talking about one's business experience is not usually a good way to win them over. On election day, it became clear to me that the Republican Party had been led into Purgatory by the Laodicean wing. In case you aren't familiar with Revelation 3:14-17, here is what...

Operation Demoralize, the attempt to convince you that conservatism is dead, that you live in a media cocoon, that you are incapable of learning, and that your pundits lied to you, is dominating the media. But are the quick and easy answers — just say Yes to illegal immigration, higher taxes, creeping socialism — based on the reality of why the election was lost? Someone clearly outside the supposed “conservative media complex” suggests that the reasons being peddled for the loss are not accurate, or at least not the full story. Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, writes...

How America got used to his religion, and mine.On the night of the South Carolina Republican primary in January, I sat near the front of a dark campaign press bus and listened to reporters talk about Mitt Romney's underwear.Earlier in the day, one of them had happened upon the candidate and his wife doing laundry in the basement of our Columbia, South Carolina, hotel, and a small cluster of colleagues had now gathered to listen to him relate the anecdote, lapping up every mundane detail of this rare interaction with the closed-off couple.Finally, another reporter interrupted."Did you see their underwear?"...

(Full title: Mark Levin to Karl Rove: ‘Get the h*ll off the stage already, will you pal?’) On his Monday radio program, talk show host Mark Levin, author of “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America,” rejected the notion that the Republican Party should become more moderate to win over voters and blasted several commentators who suggested otherwise.<snip> “And I hear Rove today going on, ‘We got to do this better,’ ‘I got to do this,’ ‘Got to this,’” Levin continued. “Get the hell off the stage already, will you pal? You’re a hanger-on. I don’t say this with any personal contempt. It’s...

Grassroots Republican operatives and Movement conservatives are quickly turning against the GOP Establishment in the wake of the party's expensive defeat this election cycle. Republicans we spoke to this week voiced a near-universal disgust with the national Republican Party leaders and Washington political class, who are seen as having put their personal financial interest above winning the election. As this internecine struggle gathers steam, the first target appears to be Karl Rove, the former Bush campaign mastermind who has dictated much of the GOP's strategy over the past decade. In the wake of the party's 2012 losses, however, Rove and...

Gingrich: GOP needs to be "inclusive" In the aftermath of Mitt Romney's presidential loss last week, Newt Gingrich is joining the cadre of Republicans calling for the Republican Party to more actively reach out to a more diverse electorate, arguing on Monday that the party needs to become more "inclusive." "I think we need to be inclusive, and I emphasize the difference between inclusive and outreach," Gingrich said Monday morning in an appearance on ABC's "The View." "Outreach is when five white guys have a meeting and call you. Inclusive is when you're in the meeting. And I think we...

The maelstrom of political controversy regarding Free Republic founder Jim Robinson and his attitude towards the then Republican presidential candidate front runner and odds-on favorite to win the nomination, as anointed by the msm as the weakest candidate in the Repuplican field, was one punctuated by severe criticism of Mr. Robinson for his uncompromising, vituperative take-no-prisoners stance towards the liberal bent, RINO candidate Mr. Romney,as unacceptable under any circumstances as Republican Party nominee in the 2012 presidential election. While his intensely vociferous stance against Mr. Romney surprised, confused, alienated many, the political rationale for the utter blanket rejection of Mr....