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.
Life is a series of choices. You always try to make the best choice even in a bad situation. Romney was a better choice than Obama, and there’s not a sliver of doubt about that. You made the wrong choice....you took your marbles and went home.
Yep, our Grandfathers had to choose between Hitler or Stalin.
Actually, I’d like to apologise for including you on the header of that post.
It was written before I read your post #146.
If my conceptions of your convictions & principals are incorrect, perhaps it is due to the ideas you publicly espoused prior to that post.
Again, I apologise.
And
Because of the changing demographics of the electorate, if moderates don’t accept a candidate that falls short of their ideal, the democrats will outnumber republican votes by ever-widening margins.
Would Obama been able to win if he was white? The vast majority of black people voted for Obama because he was black. Very racist of them. But, that is the truth.
That begs the question - could Obama won the election if he were a white man?
Hmmmm.
Californians are paying $5.00 a gallon for gas and get frequent brownouts during hot summers. They also pay through the nose for their *clean* energy and massive environmental and social regulations.
They just overwhelmingly voted for more of the same.
When the moochers and looters prevail, it doesn't matter what little inconceniences they may have to suffer as long as their free bling keeps on coming. If it stops coming, they can always riot or simply skip the middleman and go out to your place and steal some of yours. Or vote in more looter politicians with the passion to do the same.
You didn't get the votes you needed. Looks like YOU made the wrong choice.
Pointing at some crank in Texas (me) where Romney had a lock isn't adding to your credibility.
/johnny
Those “conservatives” that stayed at home, are more ignorant than the “obama phone lady”. She probably has decent excuses for her ignorance, but you don’t.
They have no concept of reality, grasping to some semblance of purity and self righteousness while not voting, voting third party, etc., when the worst, most divisive, destructive anti-everything they claim to love and care for administration could have been voted out.
They'll bitch and moan about the Gope, how inept everyone (of course themselves excepted) is, and wonder what happened while our health care system, culture, and our economy go to the ash heap of history in the next four years.
They'll be squealing about everything without understanding the irony of their stupidity.
But they were pure......
I’ve been on this forum for fourteen years pal. Stop the ad hominem remarks and face the facts...you helped Obama get elected.
What you say is probably true, especially the line “4 more years of Obama will not make conservatism a winning thing”.
What this victory means ultimately is that the “takers” are being manipulated into a hardcore constituency that will usher in officially The Age of Class Warfare.
Class Warfare has been the calling card of this Administration FROM THE BEGINNING,and they’ve convinced enough people they’ve waged it “on their behalf”. As the next four years roll by and lurch on, the takers will find themselves STILL jobless and in all other ways downwardly mobile, were it not for the entitlements and gratuities this Administration has implicitly promised them. The S*it will hit the fan for them also, as more impossible stresses are placed upon the system to come up with money that won’t be there.
A Romney Administration MIGHT HAVE provided them with jobs that weren’t virtually all “governmental”, but when you’ve got BIG GOVERNMENT taking the place of free markets and private enterprise,that’s the ONLY direction that remains open and can be taken.This Administration has NEVER been interested in creating jobs-—they don’t know how to do it.
How they will manage this juggling act as the money runs out is anybody’s guess, but if their failures are as profound as they’ve been for the last four years, I don’t see any scenario except Class Warfare, and I mean REAL Class Warfare.
Romney and his goons will count every vote to make it look close. There were lots of votes that were never counted in 2008 so stuff it.
Romney was a flip-flopping liar and the folks told you what they thought of him by starting home.
Fox put out 2 polls this morning, and if I could figure out how to find anything on their site I would post them. The gist was what voters thought republicans cared about more.
The first was a list of issues. The rich and big business had over 50%. Taxpayers and middle class took less than 25%. The poor only got 3%. There were a couple more issues included but I can’t remember what they were. These were the numbers that really stood out for me.
The second poll was basically the same, but focused on not cutting taxes and cutting spending. They got 65% and 35% respectively.
Apparently, republicans and conservatives have a huge problem. Romney did talk a lot about not raising taxes on the rich. He talked very little about what he would do to help the poor. And although he did talk about the middle class, his message wasn’t clear enough. And his talk on cutting spending was boiled down to firing Big Bird.
Second. The right’s message was so distored and filtered through the media that voters had no clear picture of what Romney stood for, and the message they did get was not good. Unless the right can get ahold of the media, this is going to continue and we’ll never win another election. It’s not good enough to nominate strictly conservative candidates if their message doesn’t get out or gets distorted.
Really sorry I couldn’t post exact numbers.
Speaking of doctors and the entire Medical Establishment,
what happened to them, and why has there been NO spokesman
(except by analysts tied more to “Politics” than “Medicine”)
who have said anything about rumblings within Medicine as they brace for Hurricane Obamacare? Are they in a state of denial? What percentage of them have any idea what is in store for them, both in terms of earning power, and how they’re allowed to practice their profession?
My suspicion is that over the next two years,as they fall by the wayside, or re-combine and try to form workable organizations to fit within the New Order, they will effectively be replaced by doctors Obama will draw in huge numbers from his beloved 3rd World. This trend has been developing for decades now, and it will soon be perfected.
Mediocre/Bad doctors will find a “home” in America, and it will probably still be way preferable to what they have in Africa, Indonesia, India, or wherever.
That POLITICO article was from 2010,didn’t you notice that.
Or are you suggesting it’s STILL Job One for the GOP to stop what might be a resurgent Sarah Palin?
I did not know that Romney's people were the one's counting the votes. Well hell, they could still win!
There were lots of votes that were never counted in 2008 so stuff it.
Source for that claim?
I dont know about your assessment. We have to help break the system. Go Galt, buycott and boycott. I have a plan on making this work and will post later. Point is we are filthy, immoral, freak show society and we deserve this racist marxist homo president. He represents the people of America not the other way around.
Not until the system breaks and may are starving and perhaps dead will the people be humbled and destroy the marxist communists in our society. Until then our object should be to help the system break.
Whoops! Never mind my previous post-—I see what you meant by the “BUT” and the link.You were referring only to 2010.
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