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.
“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.”
You have a heirarchy of values, with fiscal concerns taking precedence over social concerns. Thus a fiscal conservative who supports abortion and gay marriage is a-ok to you, while a ‘conservative’ who supports socialism is not.
I see it as all one thing. Social conservativism is superior fiscally - a nation that adopts social conservative values will be a stronger nation overall and thus, will have a stronger balance sheet.
I don’t believe there are any actual fiscal conservatives. I believe that they are classical liberals. Anyone who is a conservative believes that fiscal and social issues are intertwined.
NO, my biggest problem is that I have no patience with morons.
My biggest problems is that morons like you think every single person who did not have man crush fantasies over the sweater vest is somehow a secret operative of the Karl Rove machine who sneaks out on weekends to perform coat hanger abortions while attending establishment cocktail parties.
Wake up and put on your big boy panties. There are not just “two” camps in the conservative arena. Karl Rove is a huge problem. So is Todd Akin. They are not the same problem, but they are both problems.
From where I sit, though, Obama is a bigger problem than any of them. I worked for two candidates not named Romney in the primary season. My focus was one removing Obama. I did what I could, and then I did what I had to do.
Now, do I “trust” Romney on all social issues? No, not really. But I’ll tell you what. I totally trust Obama. I totally trust Obama to do the immoral thing at every turn and to advance that agenda aggressively. So, do you trust Obama on social issues?
I voted for Cruz. I supported a winner this election and helped put in a tea party conservative.
How did you fare?
Dead wrong. If it was in your power to mitigate abortion, homosexuality, socialism and you instead sat on your hands and said "waaaaaah...somebody earn my vote" you are most certainly responsible.
Many Germans allowed the rise of Hitler by sitting on their hands. Similarly you sat out the election and did not vote against the highest evil. Yet somehow you see yourself as a victim from whom we on FR need to "earn" something?
Twisted.
Under the circumstance we are now in it is unlikely that those who did not participate or who voted 3rd party will have any influence with the Republican party and likely no Conservatives or Tea Partiers, the fact that Republicans lost this election already have them leaning more left. My post is directed at those on this site who did not participate and who attempted to “browbeat” others into non-participation and want to denigrate those who did participate.
I was not at all “happy” about Romney but was very enthusiastic about beating obama. I believe that anyone who thought there could be any advantage to not supporting Romney in this election were not thinking clearly. I don’t know that they are part of the reason or not, there is also the voter and election fraud which I believe will only get worse and we only have sham elections in our future.
I’m letting go of my anger. It is doing me no good and calling people names will not help anything.
This country was founded in the Great Awakening. Now it is time for all of us to repent of our wicked ways and turn to God so He will hear from Heaven and heal our land.
For all my angry posts...I am sorry. We need Jesus and not blame.
You are a phariseeical jerk. Ayn Rand, an atheist, in some ways, understands more about morality than you do. You claim that fiscal issues are NOT moral issues, which is absurd. But you base everything in your dark legalistic phariseeical heart off of that phony premise.
What I want to know is, when Obamas government strip you of your freedoms and your property, just how much good will you be to the unborn? When you no longer own your time, because you have stood by in a self righteous fog, and lost your liberty because you didn’t think “fiscal” issues were important, just what will you be able to do for the unborn?
When you don’t have a job, and can’t afford 15 dollar gas, and inflation has made feeding you and your family a real challenge, just how will you get to the pro life rally? Just what will you put into the offering plate? How will you be salt to a dying world when you no longer own your self, your time - and are merely a ward of the state.
And when you are old and ill, and an Obama Care bureaucrat holds the decisions of whether or not you will receive medical care in their hands, what will your view of the sanctity of life be then? Will you then realize that there is no such thing as a merely “fiscal” issue? Will you then understand that “fiscal” issues are merely the incarnation of life outside the womb?
When? In your case, never. Get your will ready. Your friendly Obama Care IRS agent and death panel bureaucrat has you in their cross hairs.
That battle is over, sweetheart.
He's what we've got.
You cannot make me vote for a liberal, even with an (R) behind his name.
That grates on you. badly.
You are angry. You want to lash out, and do, and turn off conservatives that mainly support your ideals.
Is that what you really, really want to do?
I'll still be here 10 years from now, and we'll have to deal with each other. Regard your words well, or regret them later.
/johnny
Honestly, Ed, I don't know why you're still around here because you think that you're smarter than everybody else.
For example, the biggest issue is that the Candidate be a lifelong, true-blue Republican. We are long past the days where we could pick up a stray Democrat to run for us, and there are not currently any of those broad brush faction movements ~ e.g. Southern whites from Democrat to Republican, or practicing Catholics from Democrat to Republican.
So it's time to focus on the Republican street cred of any particular candidate for President.
Out of the 16 known registered serious candidates for President this year only 3 were lifelong Republican Conservatives!
Two of them were technically residents of Virginia, so they couldn't both run as President and Vice President ~ the third one may also have resided in Virginia for a while in a previous job.
So, where did those other 13 come from and why should we have entertained their running in OUR primaries?
We failed to protect the value of our brand. That's not good for downstream sales.
The Rush caller wants the country to burn because he believes that Ronald Reagan will emerge from the ashes. How little he knows history. Reagans don't emerge from the ashes... Hitlers do.
If you stayed home, for any reason, you have earned my contempt and scorn.
Lot of those here on FR. Until the last minute the that was the rule here: No Romney.
There are two ways at looking at the quote: "We got the country we deserved.: 1)Voters chose Obama because he gives them bread,circuses and phones. 2) People did not vote for Romney because they wore blinders (the horse kind) and wanted to prove a point. Good luck with either.
But the irony is that the Romney haters didn't just cost the presidency, they also sabotaged the senate and a bigger share of the house.
nobody has ever won by losing.
No one's trying to make you vote for anything. I guess your shortsighedness also prevents you from understanding that the election is over.
Some are just trying to point out how illogical you are for refusing to vote. Thus, what you CLAIM to hate has gained greater power.
Your name is spelled I-D-I-O-T.
Careful. It sounds as if you are saying your decision not to vote this week, and perhaps in the future, is not philosophically reasoned, but an emotional reaction based on retaliation for perceived insults.
Let me tell you something about your self righteousness: it makes you ignorant. As stated, I worked very hard against Mitt in the primary. We all lost that fight. I was never excited about him.
So, you say you won’t vote for a liberal no matter what. Fine. Your right. But maybe go to this link, and if you have ever been half the man that is unveiled in this link, you get back to me. I won’t hold my breath, because you aren’t half the man you so self righteously attack as being morally inferior to you.
I have many problems with Mitt as a candidate and with his faith. Having said that, I trust he and God can work that out with no help from me. Meanwhile, he walked it out better than you ever will. Read and repent.
So there is no room in your philosophy for anyone to ever change. In other words you're a purist. You would have sat out 1980 and refused to vote for Reagan.
Congrats.
My comments are to those who are stating they did “stay at home”, “no vote” or “voted 3rd party”, those who on this site were advocating others do the same and have described some of us who voted for Romney as “battered wives” and also want to say that this was not a denigrating remark. Of course much worse has been said of me and I only believe it’s making him feel better about his lack of effort in beating obama.
I know it’s difficult to overcome election and voter fraud in close elections and this was very close especially in the swing states. With the re-election of obama it is not likely to get any better. Republican voter registration was up in states that register by party from all accounts I’ve read prior to the election so that would mean we either had a massive die off of Republicans or we had many stay home that could possibly have given us a winning margin in some of these swing states.
I thought that social conservatives were forced to vote for Romney and that we had no other choice.
Are you saying that’s not true?
McCain got enough votes in 2008 to lead elitists like Rove to believe that the GOP should nominate another liberal in 2012. Although Romney got fewer votes than McCain, my fear is that Romney got enough votes to lead elitists like Rove to believe that the GOP needs an even more liberal candidate in 2016.
In my view, the only way to change the direction of this country is for people to quit voting for liberals, period. If conservatives vote for liberals, that's what they'll get the next time, every time. The elitists pay attention to election results. There is only one way to tell them that enough is enough. Quit buying their baloney!
The day of the RINO is over.
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