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.

It is disappointing to see this thread degenerate into a fight over a conservative voter choosing not to vote for Romney. Here are some thoughts:

Since McGovern, the Democrats have consistently nominated candidates who appeal to their leftist base. Whether we like it or not these candidates are true believers in liberal social values and socialist economics. They have abandoned the moderate “blue dog” party members to be ideologically pure in their collectivist philosophy. With Obama they’ve reached the point where they don’t even pretend to run to the middle. Witness the 2012 campaign where Obama remained very open about his core principles (redistribution, high taxes, high spending, fiscal irresponsibility, free abortion, green energy, etc) and openly tried to exacerbate class, racial and gender divisions.

In contrast the Republican establishment refuses to fully embrace conservative principles. They continue to play the Democrat and media game of appealing to interest groups by moderating principles. Instead of ideological true believers most recent Republican candidates (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Dole, the two Bushes, McCain, and Romney) have been pragmatic poll driven politicians who seek to espouse positions that will appeal to various voter groups, without completely alienating the base. The public knows they are not true believers and they will shift positions as the wind blows to get elected.

The exceptions have been Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Goldwater was destroyed by the media, plus was unfortunate in timing to be running against the successor to a dead President and one of the most clever politicians in US history. Reagan stayed true to his principles throughout the 1980 campaign and offered the people a clear choice to the inept incumbent Jimmy Carter. Although he trailed the race in the polls almost to election day, when people went into the voting booth the majority of the voters realized the country needed a change and Reagan was bedrock solid in his core principles. Rightly or wrongly, they knew he would not waver in the face of adversity or setbacks so the direction he set would hold. The country craved strong leadership and one of the characteristics of a strong leaders is having and sustaining core principles.

in 2012 the electorate was dealing with another failed leader. Instead of offering the people a principled leader with unwavering values, the GOP presented a left of center moderate who pragmatically espoused conservative principles during the primaries to seize the party’s nomination. This “flip flopping” from previous positions on abortion, health care, and social spending was used by the opposition to define Romney as untrustworthy and unprincipled. While his business credentials indicated he had demonstrated leadership potential in the private sector, they did not prove to the voters he could lead the nation. The great political leaders in history have all possessed steadfast core guiding principles that enable them to guide and lead the nation through the toughest times. In the campaign Romney failed to show the nation he had the backbone and conviction in his core values, to lead the nation. He could not make this case because in his political life he had a history of shifting positions to meet the needs of the time and place.

To win Romney had to do some combination of the following:
1) Suppress the Obama vote significantly
2) Persuade Obama voters to switch
3) Increase the turnout of Republican voters to a much higher participation rate than historical

If you look at the execution of his campaign he spent no time and effort on #1. He was lucky the Obama turnout was less than 2008, but it wasn’t due to his efforts. There is evidence to suggest he put resources against #3 but failed. With respect to #2 the economic conditions for moving the electorate to vote against the President were there. However, there is inertia in the electorate and even in bad times (witness Roosevelt in the 1936 and 1940) voters are reluctant to throw out incumbents unless they are absolutely convinced the alternative (Reagan in 1980 and Clinton in 1992) offers a real change. While Romney may have made the case he was a successful business leader, he failed to convince enough people he was a strong enough political leader to make people switch. Citizens who voted for Obama in 2008 knew who Obama was by 2012 and the Obama of 2012 was the same leftist Obama they voted for in 2008. Remember, the Obama of 2008 had the most leftist voting record in the Senate — he did not change. He also was very emphatic in the 2012 campaign in stating would not change his policies. As a leader he was clear he was sticking with his principles. As a political leader in 2012, Romney was shown to be shifting dramatically to the right from principles he had espoused as a Senate candidate in the 1990’s and as governor of Massachusetts early in this decade.

Romney and his Republican establishment backers thought they could present Romney as a strong business leader and convince the 2008 Obama voters a successful business technocrat would be a better leader of the nation because he could “manage” the economy better. Those voters needed convincing he was a multidimensional leaders with core principles that would guide him and the nation through other issues that might arise during his time in office. Unlike Reagan he never demonstrated what guided his heart and soul. Obama did and was the known quantity. Given the absence of a clear choice, 2008 Obama voters stayed with the choice they made in 2008 instead of choosing the unknown.

In the business world one truism in sales is you have to convince the customer to buy the product. The customer does not owe anything to you and will not buy just because you show up at the door. You have to convince the customer your product is a better value that what he/she is using today. Another truism in sales is that if you allow your competition to define your brand you will not earn the sale. Let me emphasize the word “earn”.

If Romney was truly a great businessman he would have understood he needed to define the Romney brand clearly, early in the campaign, and sell it as a different product than the Obama brand. He failed. He allowed Obama to define the Romney brand prior to the debate. He failed to demonstrate he had unwavering core principles (likely because he didn’t).

Romney lost because he positioned himself as a moderate in a country where the electorate is sharply divided between left and right. When a nation is polarized on an ideological basis, there is no middle ground. One side must prevail by seizing power and destroying the opponent (the current Democrat strategy) or by convincing the opposing side there is a better path (the Reagan strategy). In a polarized society the politics of appeasement and compromise are the losing strategy.

The conservative dilemma remains. Stick with the Republican moderate party as the less offensive choice or strike out and form a ideologically pure party espousing individual liberty and limited government to offer a clear choice versus the collectivist democrats. If we choose the former, unless we gain control of the party leadership, we will continue to be supporting the candidates of compromise and appeasement.

My last comment. No voter owes any candidate a vote just as no store is owed a sale from a customer in the private economy. It is the candidate’s job to earn the vote just like it is the salesman’s job in the private sector to earn the sale. When a candidate fails to win, he/she has failed to make the sale.

Such important and vital things would have been achieved with a President Romney. Our relationship with Israel tops my list due to the massive destruction of life and economics(energy prices etc) that will happen when Israel and Iran exchange blows. With Hussein, we retain the enemy of Israel in the White Hut. Israel is now assured that they stand alone, and have the “American”(not)president supporting the terrorists who want to wipe Israel off the map.

Defunding Planned AbortionHood. How’s that for a great thing President Romney would do?

The halting of DeathCare was vital, as was domestic energy independence and the unimaginable number of jobs and economic stimutation that would have produced.

The deaths of millions of jobs and businesses is here already. My small business will close June first. I suffered 4 years under Hussein’s regime and hung on for him to be gone. As of Tuesday my decision was made.

*So thank you, protest voters, sit-at-home-and-pouters, enjoy the hell you have allowed to continue as we all circle the drain together for your precious unachievable perfect candidate. You gave us Hussein. But as long as you’re happy.....you go ahead and be all proud about your protest of Mitt Romney a man who has given and given throughout his life to others. He didn’t even take a salary as Gov of Mass. and was not going to take one as President either. He actually has lived a life of principle, unlike the spoiled my-way-or-the-highway voters who gave us Hussein.

End of rant

It appears that none of you have any conservative beliefs.

JRandomFreeper, Myself, and others here believe that all of this ignorant hand-wringing over demographics, and inclusion is just a load of advertising. People vote for their own self-interest, just like you do. If our ideas work better for them than the other guys ideas do, our guy will get the vote.

If you don’t BELIEVE that socially and fiscally conservative ideas when implemented as polcy will “work”, WHY ARE YOU HERE?

If you do believe that socially and fiscally conservative ideas work better than vote buying, then stop the insane attempts to win by being more like the vote-buying party.

I never held out for the perfect candidate. I held out for one who would represent my interests, and the GOP did not field one.

It isn’t our obstinance that kept us from voting Romney, it was HIS distancing himself from anything that could be described as a Conservative position, and your full-throated support of that approach disgusts me, almost as much as these relentless verbal attacks on anyone who didn’t do *your* master’s bidding.

I don’t owe you, or the Republican party, or the millions of idiots who voted for Obama a damned thing; especially not my vote.

If the Republican party doesn’t walk the Conservative walk, they won’t get the Conservative vote. Are you really too stupid and frightened to see that?

If ANY party will try to limit the government’s interference in the daily lives of it’s citizens, allow the marketplace to work, actually defend the nation against her enemies (not just the armed ones), and promote liberty; that party will win my vote and will, as the wisdom and efficacy of these policies become evident, attract a lot more of those “other” demographic groups. Who knows? They might even earn the vote of Foundationless Squishes like yourselves.

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