Nielsen: 66.8 Million Tune Into Election Coverage in Primetime, Down 6% from 2008
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That is about 6 million drop in viewers:
71.5 million (2008) and 66.8 million (2012).
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.
“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”
I find the election outcome numbers implausible, but I also know that the white voters that have entered eternal rest since the 2008 election have been replaced by Hispanics and Asians, not whites.
Early voting isn’t the problem per se. It’s the inconsistency in rules. Limit it to start no sooner than two weeks befor the election everywhere.
Where do all of you knuckle-headed noobs come from?
Why is Jim allowing anti-american crap like you to sign up?
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It’s not who votes, it’s who counts the votes...
There is only one significant factor: Vote Fraud.
Obama didn’t win, and we need to force this into the light of day.
8 million is a lot people! An analysis hopefully will be done precinct by precinct and then 2012 compared to 2008 and even 2004. Say if a precinct went for Bush in 04 and McCain in 08, then you can come up with a percentage for Bush and McCain for those years and compare with the percentage that went for Romney. I would think they should be close. If lines were redrawn, then that would cause a problem.
PEW is very much a part of the crime.
>> “It’s not who votes, it’s who counts the votes.” <<
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Exactly.
This is squarely in the middle of coal country. Is it possible that coal miners are so stupid as to resent the fact that Romney has more money than they do? I doubt it. There has to be more to this story.
Interesting. Yet the GOP candidate was posted as winning the governor’s mansion within a short time of the polling places closing but the state vote for the presidency wavered for hours before Romney was called the winner by a pretty slender margin. What goes? Did many Republicans refuse to vote for a president because they were so angry about having another ‘moderate’ railroaded down their throats or did many Evangelicals listen to the message being spread in their churches that voting for a Mormon for president was a mortal sin and would put their soul’s in danger of hell fire? Seriously what went on in NC?
Really? Maybe you should go back a few months and peruse then endless, merciless Romney-bashing that took place here on this forum. For quite a while, simply saying something good about Romney was enough to get you zotted. Now people are acting shocked that he lost? Give me a break.
Six months ago: "ROMNEY IS A PIECE OF S*** PRO-ABORTION HOMO-LOVING RINO!!!!!"
November 7, 2012: "VOTER FRAUD ROBBED US!!!!!"
It would be funny if the outcome weren't so tragic.
Nothing backdoor about it. It was smeared all over FR for months, during the primary season. Same operatives probably were sending DNC e-mails and making push-poll phone calls.
is it possible that they tried to vote but were intimidated out of it? What were the new black panthers up to this time? How come we didn’t hear anything about them or the old ACORN shock troops? Just because the organization was disbanded doesn’t mean that those people all disappeared
There are an awful lot of dislocated people in the northeast, and people who still have no power. I would guess the majority of them are white.
Special polling stations were set up for election day. But when you're cold, unwashed, and hungry for 8 days, voting might not be your first priority.
Makes sense....thanks for commenting.
Something I noted myself on election day when I cast my ballot here in Florida was this. I was approx. number 35or 40 in line before polls opened. Once inside and after recieveing my ballot to head to the booth to fill it out I had to wait again for one to free up. There were 25 booths.
Long story short;
When I put my ballot into the counter I waited to see if there was a reciept to insure that what the machine read is what I voted. There were no receipts but I did notice the counter went from 9 to 10 “ballots counted”. I know good and well more than 9 people proceeded me to the ballot counter.
I was gobsmacked, and have had more than a little difficulty coming to terms with it, when my younger brother, a retired Air Force Major, retired School Administrator with an M.ed., and Church Deacon, told me a few weeks ago that he thought corporate business executives were greedy and took advantage of the working middle class to gain their undeserved wealth. He even said that he thought Socialism could work if Capitalists didn't always subvert its fair and equal intentions. He said he would still vote for Romney but now I wonder. It is possible he was just pushing my buttons to continue some old sibling rivalry, but it has disturbed me more than he will ever know.
I believe there was massive vote fraud in this election, and your story is one of many similar we will hear. Is anyone looking at this more seriously? I have no trust in those voting machines at all and we know, from experience, that the Democrats will do anything to win. I’d like to see a real examination of the numbers. I don’t believe there were a lot of missing white voters—just missing white votes.
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