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Nope. Not at all......
Posted on 11/08/2012 11:29:45 AM PST by fifedom
Romney may underperform (or barely match) in turnout the listless McCain in 2008. According to exit polls Romney won white evangelicals by a four-to-one margin—as high or higher than George W. Bush in 2004. Could it have been that many evangelicals couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, and simply stayed home?
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Wait, the turnout was what?! As the numbers continue to come into focus (and the final vote tally is still days or weeks away), the fact that Romney may underperform (or barely match) the listless McCain in 2008 is the real shocker of the election. Maybe we should have just run McCain/Palin again. Obama’s vote total will be down something like six to eight million from his 2008 total; it is unprecedented for a president to be re-elected without adding to his vote total from the first election. Hardly a vote of confidence.
The white vote, it turns out, was tepid. If the white vote had turned out to its potential, Romney wins and we wouldn’t need to go through the current hand-wringing about whether the GOP needs to seek amnesty from Latinos. What’s going on here? Keep two factoids in mind. First, according to exit polls Romney won white evangelicals by a four-to-one margin—as high or higher than George W. Bush in 2004. But second, recall Karl Rove’s theory after the 2000 election that Bush’s missing majority in that train-wreck election was the 3 million or so evangelicals who stayed home and didn’t vote, possibly because they were put off by the late DUI news about Bush. Finding and (successfully) turning out those voters became the key to Bush’s increased margin of victory in 2004.
It’s going to be a while before we know better whether the total potential evangelical vote didn’t turn out for Romney, and if not, why. Could it have been that many evangelicals couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, and simply stayed home? I distinctly recall polling data from back in 2008 that found as many as 20 percent of voters said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon (versus only about 1 or 2 percent for a black or a Jew), and I wondered whether those 20 percent were un- or anti-religious liberals who wouldn’t vote for a Republican in any case, or whether they were theologically conservative evangelicals who are uncomfortable with heterodox Mormon doctrine? I’ve had numerous conversations with serious evangelical friends over the last couple of years who all said of course I’ll vote for Romney because I can’t stand Obama, but they admitted having doubts about it. My self-selecting sample are mostly intellectual and politically-engaged evangelicals; what about the kind of evangelical that doesn’t like or follow politics closely? Keep in mind that a lot of evangelicals eschew politics as a this-worldly dominion best left alone: the City of Man versus City of God.
Sean Trende doesn’t think so. He thinks rural whites in Ohio just didn’t turn out. Neither does AllahPundit, who offers some exit poll numbers. But Charlie Martin thinks maybe so. And see David Mason in the Washington Post today:
Evangelical America has been flogging Mormonism as Satan’s own retail outlet for decades. But the suddenly ubiquitous appearances of the word cult on the eleven o’clock news and in ostensibly serious political conversations in the early primary days gave legitimacy on the national stage to the characterization of me as a glassy-eyed, reclusive loon from whom the neighborhood alley cats run in fear.
One thing for sure: the major media and establishment political analysts won’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.
Could it have been that many evangelicals couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon,
I am so sick and tired of this question....This is the correct question.......COULD IT HAVE BEEN THAT MANY EVANGELICALS COULDN’T BRING THEMSELVES TO VOTE FOR A LYING SACK OF CRAP LIBERAL ROMNEY?????? It had nothing to do with Mormonism. I am neither Mormon or Evangelical.
That Obama did so poorly compared to 2008 is what makes this loss so much more depressing. Victory was clearly there for the taking, yet our side didn’t turn out to it’s potential, and we didn’t turn enough of Obama’s white voters who did actually vote.
Strangely I have talked to a number of religious black people who said they were not going to vote for president this time because they did not like either candidate. I'm not sure if there was a missing number of black voters or if they were just blowing smoke.
Did the presidential vote numbers come out the same as the other races?
I just read things indicating the Evangelical turnout was as high as ever, now it is being doubted again? Does anyone actually KNOW or is this based on “exit polls” again or what?
Maybe we all need to let this simmer for awhile until some real number crunching can go on. It seems the GOP/Conservative numbers crunchers are getting their AZ!Z kicked by Lib numbers crunchers....so let’s give it a while to figure things out.
If voting against Obama isn’t enough to get Evangelicals off their asses and to the polls, what is?
I say screw ‘em as a voting bloc.
In '08, the G.O.P.e. handed us a s### sandwich and said, " here's a very nice sandwich, go ahead, eat it, you'll like it".
So in 2012, they hand us another s### sandwich and tell us, "you'll like this one much better, for you see, this time, it's on toast"!
It’s most likely not even true, just as it wasn’t after McCain. I notice that the people who plainly said they wouldn’t vote for Romney-the libertarian types-aren’t being mentioned.
I guess next time they’ll skip the bread and just feed us the s###.
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Nope. Not at all......
Your table only shows the percentages among people who voted. It does not say what fraction of each group actually turned out to vote. The original article makes it clear that Romney did well among evangelicals who actually did vote.
Evangelicals were a slightly larger part of the 2012 electorate than in 2008. The raw numbers were down, but that was true across the board in pretty much all subgroups.
Basically, the republicans said to conservatives, “Screw you. We don’t need your input. We don’t support your values. You embarrass us. Go away. We don’t need you to win.”
Since the republicans chose to run Romney, they have no one but themselves to blame for the loss.
Message to republicans, if you want conservative support, run a real conservative!
Did fewer numbers of Evangelicals over all turn out to vote? 80% of those Evangelicals who voted on the presidential race does not take into account Evangelicals who stayed home or only voted down ticket, the latter numbers are the relevant numbers.
I should have read the rest of the replies, before replying.
Already been said by the republican party. This "battered wife" just left the abuser and said, "screw someone else."
Really? With a question like this "Could it have been that many evangelicals couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, and simply stayed home?" it looked like another "Blame Christians First" article.
Is your post # 1 part of the article? Naturally I didn't click the link. And since you posted such a short incomplete excerpt, I figured there wasn't anything to read anyway.
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