Posted on 11/10/2012 5:13:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The key to understanding the 2012 election is simple: A huge slice of the electorate stayed home.
The punditocracy — which is more of the ruling class than an eye on the ruling class — has naturally decided that this is because Republicans are not enough like Democrats: They need to play more identity politics (in particular, adopt the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration) in order to be viable. But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. They are Washington. With no hope that a Romney administration or more Republicans in Congress would change this sad state of affairs, these voters shrugged their shoulders and became non-voters.
“This is the most important election of our lifetime.” That was the ubiquitous rally cry of Republican leaders. The country yawned. About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 — 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry.
That is staggering. And, as if to ensure that conservatives continue making the same mistakes that have given us four more years of ruinous debt, economic stagnation, unsustainable dependency, Islamist empowerment, and a crippling transfer of sovereignty to global tribunals, Tuesday’s post-mortems fixate on the unremarkable fact that reliable Democratic constituencies broke overwhelmingly for Democrats. Again, to focus on the vote is to miss the far more consequential non-vote. The millions who stayed home relative to the 2008 vote equal the population of Ohio — the decisive state. If just a sliver of them had come out for Romney, do you suppose the media would be fretting about the Democrats’ growing disconnect with white people?
Obama lost an incredible 9 million voters from his 2008 haul. If told on Monday that fully 13 percent of the president’s support would vanish, the GOP establishment would have stocked up on champagne and confetti.
To be sure, some of the Obama slide is attributable to “super-storm” Sandy. Its chaotic aftermath reduced turnout in a couple of big blue states: New York, where about 6 million people voted, and New Jersey, where 3.5 million did. That is down from 2008 by 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Yet, given that these solidly Obama states were not in play, and that — thanks to Chris Christie’s exuberance — our hyper-partisan president was made to look like a bipartisan healer, Sandy has to be considered a big net plus on Obama’s ledger.
There also appears to have been some slippage in the youth vote, down 3 percent from 2008 levels — 49 percent participation, down from 52 percent. But even with this dip, the under-30 crowd was a boon for the president. Thanks to the steep drop in overall voter participation, the youth vote actually increased as a percentage of the electorate — 19 percent, up from 18 percent. Indeed, if there is any silver lining for conservatives here, it’s that Obama was hurt more by the decrease in his level of support from this demographic — down six points from the 66 percent he claimed in 2008 — than by the marginal drop in total youth participation. It seems to be dawning on at least some young adults that Obamaville is a bleak place to build a future.
Put aside the fact that, as the election played out, Sandy was a critical boost for the president. Let’s pretend that it was just a vote drain — one that explains at least some of the slight drop in young voters. What did it really cost Obama? Maybe a million votes? It doesn’t come close to accounting for the cratering of his support. Even if he had lost only 8 million votes, that would still have been 11 percent of his 2008 vote haul gone poof. Romney should have won going away.
Yet, he did not. Somehow, Romney managed to pull nearly 2 million fewer votes than John McCain, one of the weakest Republican nominees ever, and one who ran in a cycle when the party had sunk to historic depths of unpopularity. How to explain that?
The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.
As the 2012 campaign elucidated, the GOP wants to be seen as the party of preserving the unsustainable welfare state. When it comes to defense spending, they are just as irresponsible as Democrats in eschewing adult choices. Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? In fact, when did the GOP last explain how a country that is in a $16 trillion debt hole could afford to enlarge anything besides its loan payments?
Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off — and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming.
As ZeroHedge points out, we now pay out $250 billion more on mandatory obligations (i.e., just entitlements and interest on the debt) than we collect in taxes. Understand, that’s an annual deficit of a quarter trillion dollars before one thin dime is spent on the exorbitant $1.3 trillion discretionary budget — a little over half of which is defense spending, and the rest the limitless array of tasks that Republicans, like Democrats, have decided the states and the people cannot handle without Washington overlords.
What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party’s nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on — cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium. In the void, the party establishment proceeds to delegate its response to John McCain and Lindsey Graham: the self-styled foreign-policy gurus who urged Obama to entangle us with Benghazi’s jihadists in the first place, and who are now pushing for a repeat performance in Syria — a new adventure in Islamist empowerment at a time when most Americans have decided Iraq was a catastrophe and Afghanistan is a death trap where our straitjacketed troops are regularly shot by the ingrates they’ve been sent to help.
Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it — or, if they do, they lack confidence that they can explain its benefits compellingly. They’ve bought the Democrats’ core conceit that the modern world is just too complicated for ordinary people to make their way without bureaucratic instruction. They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.”
The calculation is straightforward: Republicans lack the courage to argue from conviction that health care would work better without federal mandates and control — that safety nets are best designed by the states, the people, and local conditions, not Washington diktat. In their paralysis, we are left with a system that will soon implode, a system that will not provide care for the people being coerced to pay in. Most everybody knows this is so, yet Republicans find themselves too cowed or too content to advocate dramatic change when only dramatic change will save us. They look at education, the mortgage crisis, and a thousand other things the same way — intimidated by the press, unable to articulate the case that Washington makes things worse.
Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. (See Jonah Goldberg’s jaw-dropping tally from early 2004 — long before we knew their final debt tab would come to nearly $5 trillion.) No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.
That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. It’s certainly not an alternative. For Americans who think elections can make a real difference, Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.
Those 9 million Americans need a new choice. We all do.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.
If there had been a Republican running, they might have won.
And how about your own actions. Boner wouldn’t be in this spot had Mitt won.
You're up against a bunch of republican party cheerleaders who have been blinded by itty-bitty things that don't matter in the larger scheme.
This is not a high school athletic contest, this is politics.
If an analogy is needed, you have the players, the coaches, the cheerleaders, the referees and the scorekeepers. If the players don't perform, whatever else the rest of that crew is doing doesn't really matter.
Last I checked Boner had a house majority. There are plenty of things he can do to prevent the enforcement of Obamacare. Instead, day one of the agenda appears to be capitulation.
So you’re saying that I was right not to trust Romney or Boner to overturn Obamacare?
That describes the 3 dozen blue collar white guys I work with. They all hate obama and they hate romney too. A few of them voted but they all cancelled each other out.
I'm wondering why I bothered voting at all.
You lost.
You and yours with pop guns are not going to stop that.
You supported a loser. You are bitching at me for not voting for your loser.
Take a deep breath, and examine that point of view.
/johnny
My guess is that the Southern Baptist vote for the republican was about 80% or so, the same as it was in 2008
Romney won 79% of the Evangelical vote, and 48% of the Catholic vote, and 26% of the non-religious vote, which groups refused to support the Mormon?
The article is consistent with what I’ve been arguing since election night: the lower Republican vote total was a result of marginal voters who were not sufficiently motivated by Romney to head to the polls. It wasn’t the active party members or Tea Party members or politically active Evangelicals or conservative Catholics who failed to show up - it was Joe Six Pack who was royally P.O.’d in 2010 but who didn’t believe Romney would really make a difference in 2012. Why? Because Romney couldn’t hit the hot button issues like the Tea Party did in 2010. Romney had no credibility attacking Obamacare when he was the author of Romneycare. He had no credibility on issues like homo-marriage and abortion, because people know he is actually in favour of both. He had no credibility on fiscal responsibility, because he spent the entire election saying that he would preserve medicare and Social Security as they are, only operate them more “efficiently”. He had no credibility on his promise to appoint conservative judges because he has a track record of appointing liberal judges. Those of us who are politically aware know Romney would still have been far better than Obama, but for the apathetic voter there wasn’t much on the surface to distinguish one from the other.
Who is "they"? And how did they pick our candidates?
You can't win with bad candidates. We had mostly poor candidates who chose to run in the GOP primary this time around. I mean, Herman Cain? Come on. These are joke candidates. Of course Romney won the nomination with a field that turned out so awful. The same phenomenon is playing out with our candidates for state wide Senate offices. We are struggling to win Senate seats because of some of the piss poor candidates the grass roots is nominating. I mean, good grief, Todd Akin was being backed by money from Democrats because they knew he was very likely to implode his own campaign - and yet a plurality of the Missouri GOP primary voters nominated this bum anyway.
Your data does not include people who did not vote.
Mitt came out against the republican platform on issue after issue, including abortion.
/johnny
It includes the data that you need to answer to, as you attack the most pro-Romney voting block in America.
The Evangelical share of the vote was 23%, the same as in 2008 and higher than in 2004.
Romney won 79% of the Evangelical vote, and 48% of the Catholic vote, and 26% of the non-religious vote, which groups refused to support the Mormon?
I love the 2A.....more than you as I voted for Romney while you voted for obama.
You sure got that right.
I understand that you are angry, and upset. Go ahead and vent.
You will have to deal with me 4 years from now, and in the interim. Perhaps you might want to think before you type.
/johnny
There you have it, folks. In a nutshell.
GOP doesn't need conservatives.
Son, I'm fighting now, and it is to blows. Just because I don't vote for your particular liberal doesn't mean I'm not working for conservatism.
Try again in 4 years. Run a conservative.
/johnny
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