The Voters Who Stayed Home (The Key to Understanding the Results of the 2012 Elections)

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.

— 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.

Actually, I'm rather mercenary with my attitude and vote.

Want my vote? Run a conservative.

It's a free market kind of thing.

I have something you want. I want something.

Yelling at me for being 'stupid' isn't going to get you what you want. In fact, it makes me not want to deal with you at all.

Run a conservative.. and I'm right there with support.

/johnny

The Baby Boomers are well into their 60s, with a serious death rate ~ so everybody is losing that body of registered voters ~ and down the road everyone will face the situation where the abortion rates of the 70s, 80s, 90s begin to make a really serious draw down on people available to be Democrats.

Note, we are already into that period, but lots of people don't register and vote until they begin to be vested in the economy and society ~ the kids lucky to escape their mother's knives in the 1970s are now, themselves nearing 40! That's when registration picks up ~ they are ours for the taking!

The Democrats reported 4 years ago that after their extra heavy duty voter registration drives that they really were running out of people to register to vote ~ and then this year they had anywhere from 5 to 10 million voters just flat out disappear!

Due to a higher abortion rate among the ethnic groups the Democrats prey on, and the Republicans pray over, their ability to win elections may wane to the point of political irrelevancy. The next midterms should show another 30 to 35 million voter fall off among Democrats ~ and that would leave them with something like 25 million voters against our 45 million voters, which will probably give us a 3/4 or more majority in the House.

We've likely seen the last Democrat control in the Senate for at least a century.

Now is no time to alienate the Right to Lifers and the SoCons. They are the wave of the future.

At the same time we can well afford to dump the GOP-e!

This is a basic, basic lesson. You do not vilify the most passionate, and dedicated supporters in order to fish for wishy washy moderates.

Here is an even more basic lesson: Passionate supporters don't sit at home on their thumbs whining while the country goes to hell.

I wonder how many of these whiners didn't bother to participate in the primaries? Probably 100%.

Your biggest problem is that you can't force us to do what you want, the way you want to do it.

You have to get our agreement. And we are obnoxious little pricks that won't roll over for you.

Frustrating, isn't it.

So... go stress out, have your little stroke, and figure out that yelling at people doesn't get you what you want.

Then... you might possibly want to consider running a conservative as a candidate.

Crazy idea, I know... but it might work. What you have been doing... it ain't working.

/johnny

"Obama played the bigots like a violin."

You got that exactly right. The fascist democrat party knows they can always use religion as one of their more reliable tools to divide the conservative vote.

In a political sense and as an alternative to anyone except a Marxist foreign national and his horde of fascist appointees, Mitt sucked.

Mitt would have stopped the bleeding, though, and the patient may well bleed to death before the midterm elections much less the next Presidential election that will be even more rigged than this one was.

The majority claim to be Christian but have ignored the mass murder of infants for so long that when you're honest and include those who were murdered by contraception there have been half as many infants slain as there are people in the country. Given that fact, why would the Lord grant us an alternative any better than someone 'we the people' would have to ride herd on in order to keep him on track?

Apparently a lot of people think the perfect candidate will appear in a puff of smoke and prove it's all about faith alone with no work beyond saying the magic words in the voting booth.

Rubio will not get the EXACT same treatment as Palin, simply because he is a male. The Dems hate females who step out of line, as much as they hate blacks who step out of line.

They would have to put on their thinking caps to figure out exactly how to deride a conservative Latino. They can’t say he’s shrill or call him an Oreo. Maybe they’ll find some more of Gloria’s bimbos. That would go along with their stereotype of Latinos.

Want my vote? Run a conservative.

Another statement of childishness from you.

I'm not running anyone.

As you know the majority of people on FR were against Romney. I was one of them.

But once the primaries were over it was time to vote the partial birth abortion supporter out of office. However because of people like you, now the full-on abortionists, anti-religious freedom activists have even more power. The unborn are in a much worse state.

You yourself will have to win others' vote by running winning conservative candidates. You obviously don't like the idea of the hard work so like a child you will pout and allow dictators to gain power.

Having allowed evil to gain ground, you are equal to the Obama-ites.

[Gov. Romney appealed to middle-class Christian families who live in either rural or suburban areas.]

Not mine he didn’t.

The baby butchering, homosexualist pandering, RINO Bishop from Deseret’s state-established religion is what he is.

NO SALE.

Because I don’t have your pathetic narrow intellectually stunted view of what conservatism is. Your absurd view is conservatism means the most embarrassing moronic pro life candidate possible at all costs. My view is the Reagan view. The Levin View. The Rush view. It includes the social issues as a part of a Constitutional view of limited government and individual rights. It also recognizes that in different times, different issues rise to the top.

And it also recognizes that talent, ability, and leadership are vital too. What’s the use in believing the right things if you lack the ability to advance those causes? I’ll answer for you. NONE.

I believe in the sanctity of life - based on Biblical precepts, scientific proof that life is formed at conception, and the secular “right” to life in our founding documents.

But I also believe that fiscal issues have a huge moral component - because the theft of a man’s property is a theft of his freedom and a violation of the sanctity of life OUTSIDE the womb. Thus, I resent and reject people, and I believe you to be one, who insist that the only moral issues are the conservative social issues. That is simply a moronic close minded view that is not supported by logic or the human history.

If men are not free, and that includes free to use their own property, then there will be no one available to fight for those who cannot defend themselves.

Now is no time to alienate the Right to Lifers

I really don't think that's their motive. They want to be "Right" rather than "Right to Lifers".

People who care for the unborn vote AGAINST the murdering party.

These people didn't do that.

As the Nazi death camps were liberated, their occupants sat looking at the open gates. You would think that they would have been crowding to get out. They didn’t. Were they too weak to move? No. They could still walk. Then why didn’t they run out the open gates? Because THEY WERE AFRAID. They were afraid that freedom might be worse than what they had grown accustomed to in the death camps. They had become used to the beatings and the standing naked and the gas chambers and the crematoriums. But freedom, ohhhhh....that was scary. Fear is a tremendous motivator. It can make people stay in a death camp. Fear can also be used to motivate people to vote Democrat. The inmates were eventually convinced to leave the death camps. We must convince the fearful Democrat voters to leave the Democrat party.

“Know yourself and know your opponent, and in one hundred battles, you will always be victorious.”

We do when we are repeatedly told that our votes and support are no longer wanted or desired.

I would never let anyone make me vote for Obama by suggesting that I stay home.

You are every bit as much an Obama voter as the freeloaders that are celebrating today.

“If that’s not you, then quit going out of your way to be offended.”

I gave my honest opinion on why voter turnout was down and why he lost.

Nobody is going out of their way to be offended, you doing your best to offend them.

My guess you were the kid in school everyone wiped boogers on.

It may be a factor, but coupled with this, and we are no longer in Kansas Toto : /

deo might explain a lot of what goes on with both the Republicrat and Demican big box establishment parties:

“Hacking Democracy”
(free at http://www.hulu.com/watch/192687).
Also on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVTXbARGXso.

After you watch this you might wonder what this lady is doing still alive.
I do.

But even if we can prove that our country and states have been stolen from us, what are we going to DO about it?

What CAN we do about it?

So sue me.

If you want my vote, run a conservative.

I'm pushing hard on the ground to get Dewhurst out of any elective office.

Do you have a pinglist for something like that? Do you go door-to-door working an issue like that?

I'm not responsible for a murder I don't commit. Babies are going to die under Obama or Romney. I don't like it. I don't want it.

That particular hook doesn't work to get me to vote for your liberal.

Let me be clear...

I will not vote for anyone that doesn't have a PROVEN record of being anti-abortion, pro-2a, against socialized medicine, and hasn't reduced government.

Does that make it easier for you to understand? I don't expect it did.

/johnny

They were warned, repeatedly.

It is interesting how the GOPe responded: the hold-your-nose-and-vote candidates got progressively worse. Dole > McCain > Romney. What's next? Talk Olympia Snowe out of retirement? Talk Michael Bloomberg back into the party? Fortunately, as far as RINOs go, they don't get much worse than Romney.

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