Posted on 11/08/2012 4:44:51 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Essential reading from Sean Trende about the new demographic reality at the polls. Based on his back-of-the-envelope math, there are actually two reasons why there were more minority voters as a share of the electorate this time. One, the reason everyone knows: There were more minority voters, period. Two, the reason no one guessed: If current projections hold, there were many, many fewer white voters at the polls this year than in 2008.
Had the same number of white voters cast ballots in 2012 as did in 2008, the 2012 electorate would have been about 74 percent white, 12 percent black, and 9 percent Latino (the same result occurs if you build in expectations for population growth among all these groups). In other words, the reason this electorate looked so different from the 2008 electorate is almost entirely attributable to white voters staying home. The other groups increased their vote, but by less than we would have expected simply from population growth.
Who were they? He looked at his home state of Ohio to try to guess:
Where things drop off are in the rural portions of Ohio, especially in the southeast. These represent areas still hard-hit by the recession. Unemployment is high there, and the area has seen almost no growth in recent years.
My sense is these voters were unhappy with Obama. But his negative ad campaign relentlessly emphasizing Romney’s wealth and tenure at Bain Capital may have turned them off to the Republican nominee as well. The Romney campaign exacerbated this through the challenger’s failure to articulate a clear, positive agenda to address these voters’ fears, and self-inflicted wounds like the “47 percent” gaffe. Given a choice between two unpalatable options, these voters simply stayed home.
Yeah, I always thought the goal of Team O’s multifaceted class demagoguery of Romney wasn’t so much to win white working-class votes for Obama, which may have been unwinnable, as to keep potential Romney voters home. (Ross Douthat wrote about that in August too.) If Trende’s math is right, looks like it worked like gangbusters. Another bonbon from the national exit poll:
When voters were asked the same question about Obama, 10% said he’d favor the rich versus 44% who said the middle class. That was one of Romney’s meta-problems in trying to sell himself as the “recovery” candidate, of course. He was easily cast as a stereotypical rich country club Republican, and inexplicably he never did obvious things that he could have done to fight that image. He didn’t run positive ads early, while Obama was busy tearing him down every day with attack ads. He refused to run biographical ads until the very end showing off what a warm, kindhearted guy he is. He never went after Obama systematically on the basic point that preserving the liberal dream of a ballooning welfare state will require taxes on the middle class, not just “the one percent.” And he never pushed an agenda that was aimed overtly at breaks for the middle class. His task this year was to usher in a “new” Republican Party, partly in the spirit of the 2010 tea party takeover and partly in the spirit of flushing out all the stuff under Bush that soured the country on the GOP. But apart from choosing Paul Ryan, who didn’t get nearly as much time as I thought he would to push fiscal reform, there wasn’t a lot that felt new. Essentially, voters could keep O or give the guy who sounded like the guy whom O replaced a shot. Not surprising that a lot of people shrugged and stayed home.
This didn’t help Romney either:
The economic numbers are ugly but the trends were all the right way for O, and his final job approval ended up being several points higher than Bush’s was when he won reelection in 2004. How can that be? Well, here’s something I wrote in June of last year that I’ve been thinking about since Tuesday. There was an AP poll at the time that asked voters whether it was realistic to expect significant improvement in the economy in Obama’s first two years in office or whether it would take longer than that. To my surprise, the data showed that not only did the public not expect quick improvement, the number who said they didn’t remained basically constant month after month after month. Even thought we were getting further and further into O’s term, the public wasn’t getting impatient. Here was my attempt to explain why at the time:
I think it could go two ways if he doesn’t turn things around by next year. One: The public will continue to cut him lots of slack well into 2012, but as the election approaches and they realize that this will be their last chance until 2016 to change course, they’ll bail and we’ll see a rapid snowball effect among those blaming him for not fixing the economy. Or two: The public will decide that the current recession is so uniquely horrible, unlike anything since the Great Depression, that it’s unfair to expect any president to make major strides in just one term, which will have the ironic effect of partly neutralizing the economy as an electoral issue. That’s completely counterintuitive given its singular importance right now (fully 93 percent in this poll say the economy is extremely or very important to them, an all-time high), but paradoxically the worse things get, the easier it is for Obama to frame slow growth and chronically high unemployment as some sort of mega-quake or force majeure for which no one could reasonably be expected to have been prepared.
Boldface added. How’s that prediction looking today? Here’s Joel Benenson, the Obama campaign’s pollster, explaining the keys to victory in the Times this morning:
Such conventional [economic] indicators failed to capture the mind-set of the American people who always had a broader view of the nation’s economic situation and what had happened to their lives. A national survey of 800 voters conducted by our firm — not for the Obama campaign — during the final weekend before Tuesday’s vote, confirmed that a clear majority of Americans viewed this election in the context of the scale of the economic crisis we faced and the deep recession that ensued.
Two key data points illustrate why Americans were always far more open to President Obama’s message and accomplishments than commentators assumed. By a three to one margin (74 percent to 23 percent), voters said that what the country faced since 2008 was an “extraordinary crisis more severe than we’ve seen in decades” as opposed to “a typical recession that the country has every several years.” At the same time, a clear majority, 57 percent, believed that the problems we faced after the crisis were “too severe for anyone to fix in a single term,” while only 4 in 10 voters believed another president would have been able to do more than Mr. Obama to get the economy moving in the past four years.
Bill Clinton famously pushed that message at the convention too, that this economic hurricane was actually Katrina/Sandy and therefore no one could reasonably be expected to have cleaned up all the debris yet. The voters bought it, and Romney’s only real countermove — hammering O on how housing policies championed by Democrats contributed to the fiscal crisis in 2008 — never really happened.
Anyway, this is all a way to try to explain why middle-class whites might have stayed home. As further validation of Trende’s theory, a quick comparison between the 2012 and 2008 exit polls shows that, among the six income classes used to measure voters, turnout as a percentage of the total electorate increased in five of them. The only one that dropped, by a whopping five percent (36% four years ago to 31% now): Voters who earn between $50,000 and $99,999 per year, i.e. the middle class. Obama and McCain basically split that vote, but Romney had a six-point advantage this time among those who showed up. Not enough did.
Needless to say, though, none of this should be taken as reassurance that the GOP’s majority is still out there and that they only need to concentrate on turning out working-class whites next time. If you assume that the exit poll’s 59/39 R/O split among whites who voted would have also held for whites who didn’t, then Romney lost a net 1.3 million votes from those who stayed home based on Trende’s projections. That’s an awful lot, but based on the current popular vote totals, it’s still not enough to erase Obama’s popular vote advantage. In fact, the GOP has won the popular vote in a presidential election just once since 1988, and arguably that one — Bush’s victory in 2004 — was sui generis, a product of unusual dynamics after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. You know how Democrats regularly outnumber Republicans in polls of adults and registered voters? Well, the lesson of this election is that Obama’s organization was good enough at turning people out to make election day results look like a poll of registered voters. That’s a scary prospect for the GOP, and turning out more rural whites in Ohio won’t be enough to solve it.
Update: Pollster Bill McInturff fires back hard at Trende’s theory by insisting that, while turnout may be down a little this year, the “missing” voters can be explained very simply: They just haven’t been counted yet. In 2008, fully 9.5 million votes weren’t counted until after election day. This year, it could be as high as 9.9 million based on projection. In fact, he says, turnout in swing states was up. It’s the Sandy states, not surprisingly, where the vote went down:
Two things, though. One: Trende’s piece attempted to account for ballots that hadn’t been counted yet. He estimated that seven million were still outstanding. Even if he lowballed the number, there are still a lot of “missing” voters. Two: The exit poll data about reduced turnout among middle-class voters is what it is, no matter how many ballots are still out. I’m not sure why Sandy would have affected the middle class disproportionately, which means something else was keeping people in that bracket from the polls.
There can be no serious doubt but that the election was stolen. No other explanation makes any sense.
* 4 million LESS votes in 2012 vs. 2008 from white (non-Evangelical) Protestants...ya know, denomination mainliners like Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, liberal Lutheran, etc. [Some of these folks simply passed away & weren't replaced by younger voters in the same demographic]
* 2 million LESS white Catholic voters...in 2012 vs. 2008
[* Note: White Evangelicals were about the same -- higher % of overall pool]
Anyway, 6 million right there among white Catholics & white non-Evangelical Protestants...
Talk about VOTER FRAUD.............
What if??
I think that in a Medieval mansion somewhere in Prague or outside of Paris, Soros/Axelrod/Plouffe and whomever used the Census data and rigged the machines are toasting each other with $5,000 per bottle champagne.
I know more people were worried than 2008. I know everyone I heard of was voting.
Something is fishy. McConnell and the GOP are too limp to do anything.
If they have the civic pride to vote, why can't the whining whitebread "conservatives" do the same?
I’m telling you, the rich elitist, out of touch charges against Romney stuck. Axelrod knew what he was doing. He tapped into one of the deadly sins - envy.
Businesses around the world were counting on us to replace Obama.
Now, those companies are left in limbo.
In North Carolina, the Democrat
Governor ordered mental instututions to register and “help” the sane and profoundly retarded patients to vote. I voted in a booth next to a young man who had no idea what he was doing with a ballot.
My new SOP for any catholic or Evangelicals
Who raise any complaints about obama administration next 4 years+
Shrug my shoulders and smile . Speak not one word. Their opinions are no longer my concern.
Unions service most if not all of the voting machines in America, there were reports of problems with Romney votes being changed to Obama.
The last election was stolen, there will never be another free election here in America.
Romney had overflowing crowds, Obama had no one showing up.
The computers were rigged!
I believe that blacks have been hit extremely hard by abortion. There numbers aren’t what they should be. There are fewer private sector union people. That number is way down. The FDR Democrats are all but gone. There are fewer and fewer hippie baby boomers every year. The homosexuals? Not enough to worry about for voting purposes. Probably remains about the same. I don’t see a great increase in environmental voters. College students? Probably more of them. They usd to worry about getting jobs. Now, they worry about making sure there’s government programs to take care of them because they can’t get a job. Hispanics. Yep, more of them. Asians? Maybe a few more but probably pretty much the same numbers. Catholics. I would guess the same or maybe less. Government employees? Oh yeah, lots more of those. Chronically under and unemployed. Much higher. They vote Democrat because they don’t see any jobs so they want those government programs. Single Moms. Higher. The government becomes their husband. Professors and teachers. Higher. How many colleges do you see going under?
I think shenanigans occurred at the polling booths which seem to usually consist of what appears to be Democratic staff. I think an investigation would bear this out.
True on a percentage basis but not with total numbers. Blacks make up about 13% or so of the population, if X% die that is a much smaller number then the same percentage of whites.
Regards,
GtG
>> “ Nearly eight million white voters who were expected to vote, didn’t” <<
.
Bullshit!
They voted in record numbers, but their votes were sent to the trash.
Its time for all candidates that lost (either party, the more the merrier) to challenge the tally.
This was the most corrupt election in history.
But what about the coverage area after redistricting? My precinct polling place goes through this every 20 years, regularly as clockwork. Folks notice that suddenly it’s more crowded. Then, 10 years later, after they got used to that it flips back to fewer voters in our coverage area, since that area shrinks. They never notice.
>> “What if they voted, but their votes weren’t counted?” <<
.
That is exactly what happened.
On a massive scale.
The whole country expected a Romney victory in a big way. Let’s blow the top off of this.
WE DID NOT STAY HOME NOR DID WE LOSE ..
We wuz robbed.
I know there have been posts here that seem to explain, no .. there was no fraud, but how do the numbers make sense unless there was fraud.?
There were four reasons that Obama won (there may be more, but four that I can see):
1) Barack Obama threw out the campaign finance rules. He got all the money he could find and spent it. Were laws broken? Try and prove it. But he got and spent the money.
2) The Obama team knew that they were losing many of the voters who put him into office. They also knew that the economy was so bad that they could not hope to get them back into their camp. So, instead of touting his record, Obama spent nearly a billion dollars, plus free media, trashing Mitt Romney.
3) There was also a back-door effort, probably funded by surrogates who were not traceable to the Obama campaign, to convince evangelicals to not vote for a Mormon. I believe this got many evangelical Christians to stay home (or vote 3rd party) rather than vote for Romney.
4) Democrats changed the rules to allow early voting. In the past, they always knew that they could win if they got all their supporters to the polls. With 2-3 weeks to do it, they were able to get many of them to the polls, before they had to get them there on one day.
The Republican Party is going to have to come up with a strategy to counter number 4. The second will happen to any Republican nominee in the future, so they are going to have to go just as intensely negative in the future. The first is fine - Republicans will have to raise just as much money (more, if they want to counter the media and unions). The third is a problem with evangelical voters - it was a Mormon this time, it was feeling slighted in 2006. They have to learn that you don’t get 100% of what you want in politics - they will get zero with Obama.
Did Romney make errors in the campaign? Sure, we will be discussing those for years (success has a million fathers, failure is an orphan). But the above are the major factors.
>> “I think shenanigans occurred at the polling booths which seem to usually consist of what appears to be Democratic staff. I think an investigation would bear this out.” <<
.
While that is certainly true, the bulk of the vote theft came from the programming of the voting machinery.
.
OK. So how do we get them to vote Republican? Well, the easy step is to provide good private sector jobs for the college students and the under and unemployed. I think you could pick off some of the government employees if the private sector jobs were good paying jobs. You don’t have to give them good private sector jobs, but they have to feel like they have a chance to get that kind of job. Right now, I think they’re voting out of fear. They don’t see any good private sector jobs out there for them, so they vote for the government programs people. The Democrats will ride a good horse to death and they’ll ride this country into the dirt as long as they get taken care of.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.