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.
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.
There is only one significant factor: Vote Fraud.
Obama didn’t win, and we need to force this into the light of day.
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.
Makes sense....thanks for commenting.