Posted on 11/13/2012 9:14:41 AM PST by neverdem
Brace yourselves, conservatives. What I’m about to say will hurt, and it should hurt -- and I’m not the first to notice. (Kudos to Rush Limbaugh, who noticed and is hitting this point hard.) Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election not so much because he got fewer votes than Barack Obama but because he got fewer votes than John McCain in 2008.
Additional votes are still coming in, but, as of the time of my writing, Romney received around 57.8 million votes in 2012. In 2008, John McCain received 59.9 million. Romney got over 2 million fewer votes than McCain. And in the final count, he will almost certainly have received considerably fewer votes than McCain.
Obama received 60.6 million votes in 2012, almost 9 million less than he received in 2008. If Romney would have had McCain’s vote total, he would have been much closer in the popular vote and might have even had enough to win the Electoral College. Or, better put, if Mitt Romney had secured just a tiny fraction more votes than John McCain -- as we conservatives were certain he would -- he might have won the presidency.
We know this: Romney won independents by 5 points, and they made up 29% of all voters. McCain didn’t win independents.
What does this really mean? That’s where the hurt comes. It appears to mean that our side lost because we failed to turn out our side. It isn’t so much that the Obama-Axelrod apparatus turned out their side -- though they did -- but that our side failed to...
--snip--
Imagine: If someone had told you that Barack Obama would receive 9 million fewer votes in 2012 than 2008, you would have predicted his sure defeat. You would have been wrong. Republicans blew a huge opportunity.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
If this difference was fraud, that is one explanation.
If the difference is truly republicans not showing up to vote for President, who knows whether single posts by influential freepers pointing out the impurities of Romney, saying it well with enthusiasm how they’d never darken their thumbs for such a guy, actually gave us Obama. One confident post could have influenced 100 quiet voters over a week. And that is one of thousands of posts...
We need to call those purist voters “in a vacuum voters” because life is not like that. You don’t let your daughter get raped but only fight if she might get murdered. Freepers should use the Hippocratic oath with their voting. FIRST, DO NO HARM.
Hindsight being 20/20, we realize that had we undone Carter’s Dept of Ed in 1981-93, we might not be living with the mess we have before us today. That, and Kennedy’s open door policy on immigration, have done this country in. I honestly see no way out. Wish I did.
Blaming voter fraud will keep us in denial of the obvious.
Running people like Romney = FAIL
Unless we appeal to the lower middle classes of people as this nation gets poorer - we are NOT going to win.
It doesn't look that way.
The Case of the Missing White Voters
So who were these whites and why did they stay home? My first instinct was that they might be conservative evangelicals turned off by Romney’s Mormonism or moderate past. But the decline didn’t seem to be concentrated in Southern states with high evangelical populations.IMHO, looking at the results of the House, a lot of working class whites didn't vote for the top of the ticket.
Doesn’t explain the Senate though...
Some of you are blind.
At least if their candidate is in office they will get the blame for the problems that they cause. If the voters can't tell the difference between the candidate or their positions, what is the use of having a two party system?
I prefer clarity to consensus
You cult people are funny, give the Paul nonsense a rest, he is retiring after milking you guys of millions over the last 30 years.
see #68
The Mormon got 79% of the Evangelical vote, and 48% of the Catholic vote, and 26% of the no religion vote.
And Romney being Mormon doesn't explain Senate results either. Lousy candidates, some really dumb, and whites staying home partly explain the results in the Senate. You should read that link, "The Case of the Missing White Voters."
I think it was over when the Republicans refused to let Ron Paul speak at the convention and adopted the new rules which were said to hamper grassroots campaigns.
That really ticked off a lot of folks that I know.
Honestly, for the last couple of weeks of the campaign Romney was running around the country giving the same speech over and over.......people were getting all excited over these speeches to large crowds. It was like he thought he’d already won. Obama was doing more or less the same, but for the storm boost he evidently got.
If he’d have made it a real scrap, fast and furious, Libya etc, he’d have won this election. He was scared like McCain, he didn’t think the base or the public face of his campaign and its supporters would have his back if he dared to go there.
He had droves of motivated anti Obama supporters and plenty of resources but he squandered it tragically.
On election night I was as shocked as plenty of others, I thought he’d run a brilliant campaign, I thought he had a top rate GOTV plan.......in reality, they ran a terrible campaign but for the first debate and it’s only in retrospect that this becomes apparent.
People deluded themselves that he landed blows in the second and third debate, in reality he played it safe and was on a downward slope. That fat idiot Christie didn’t help matters either for the record, neither did unpopular big mouths like Rove and Dick Morris. Honestly, them two are equally as repugnant to your average voter as any on the left.
In spite of all of that, as a candidate, I’d still say he was better than McCain, but he was poorly advised and the campaign was poorly organized.
“Fast socialism with their candidate, or slow socialism with our candidate still leads to socialism.”
Ridiculous. Getting past this Mau Mau for the next four years was not irrevocable. In fact, buying time for the next leader to come along and using the mid-terms, strategically speaking, would have been a chance to cull the herd. Lull them to sleep with a centrist while putting a REAL team of conservatives together among the young players.
But noooooooooooo...
That’s the problem with fatuous short term thinkers. They gaze at their bellybuttons contemplating ramifications instead of putting out fires.
Get a life, Paul is meaningless, he is retiring, move on to some other cult leader.
I have no problem with fighting the GOOD fight. I do have objections to fighting the “we are not as bad as them” fight. It is a loosing strategy as the recent elections show.
If the GOP wants to get back in control, they need to be conservative and run conservatives if they want the conservatives to support them. The problem is, the GOP-e don’t want conservatives. They don’t want to hear from conservatives, they don’t want to appeal to conservatives, they don’t want to even appear to support conservative candidates or positions. Conservatives are persona-non-gratis. The only thing the GOP-e want from conservatives is their vote. And when the conservatives with hold their votes, they get pissy about it thinking that they are entitled to the conservative vote.
Sorry, I’m not playing that game anymore. If the GOP wants my vote, then nominate a conservative candidate ... period. Tea Party candidates preferred.
I will never leave Sarah Palin’s side no matter where she goes.
God bless and keep you and Sarah Palin.
She’s our very best!
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