It is intuitive to me that Obama would get fewer votes, in fact something like 9 million (?) less than he did back in '08. After all, he was very unpopular and had slipped in percentage among just about every demographic group since '08. Aside from that, many of his '08 supporters probably just stayed home.
It is counterintuitive, however, that Romney would get a couple of million less votes than McCain, given the unpopularity of Obama, the fact that Romney certainly ran a much stronger campaign than McCain, and Romney's stronger debate performance vs. Obama as compared to McCain.
What does early voting have to do with it? We'll never get a statistical breakdown of early voting vs. Election Day voting state by state, but the educated guess is that the early voting, especially in the swing states, went decisively to Zero because of the megafraud with the busloads of multiple-time voters and illegals in highly populated and targeted Dem-controlled cities and counties. In fact, the surmise would be that Romney did win among Election Day voters..
The 'Rats surely did get out the vote: they had their lackeys vote many times, transporting them through the many days of early voting, and had obvious foreigners ineligible to vote in some instances: for example the photo posted here by FReeper patriot08 of Somalians in African garb lining up to vote in Ohio.
My guess is that the announced Romney vote total was artificially low because of (1) votes for him not counted by hacked or phony devices (example would be the "shutouts" or near shutouts in a couple of hundred precincts in places like Philadelphia and Cleveland) and (2) the failure of state and local election officials to get ballots to many overseas military personnel who would have voted Romney in a big majority, among other irregularities.
People are not flying Somalians into the country just to vote ~ these people are here. Not at all surprised that someone rented a bus to take a bunch of them to the polls ~ could be that due to redistricting these voters (possibly part of a single church) might have gone to more than one voting location.
We really need more information than that they were from Somalia originally and they came to vote on a bus. It's also pretty obvious they wore their Friday Go to Prayers clothes though ~ 'cept for the ones who are Christian ~ they were wearing their Sunday (or Saturday) go to Church best clothes.
The name of the game in the fall campaign is to get your own voters out to vote for you. It's not a contest involving voters who can go either way. They all go one way, or no way.
You have to win the ideological contests during the years between elections.
Romney and McCain both forgot to get Republican voters out to vote. In the end they both got about the same number of votes ~ give or take half a mil ~ trivial in any election with 125 million voters!
Maybe in a dream world.
Romney got less votes because a lot of people who had trouble stomaching McCain went to the polls and voted for him anyway--they decided not to do that with Romney.
And frankly, after the election, I have learned things about his intended tax and spending policies that make me think the people who stayed home were correct. Zero is bad; Romney might well have been worse.
They’ve counted all the late votes now and Romney ended up with more votes than McCain
Dave Leip’s Atlas has him at 60,772,932 (McCain got 59,950,323)
That still indicates a decline in GOP turnout since he did better among independents.