Right after the 2012 election, he jumped on the “white voters stayed home” theme.
4.3 million white voters actually did stay home in 2012, but they were not Republican voters.
Romney got 1.4 million more white votes than McCain.
Obama lost 5.5 million white voters in 2012.
What goes unnoticed about 2012 is that Obama set turnout records for Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.
By the way, I'm the “expert” who crunched the numbers.
Took me about an hour using 7th grade math.
I used the Congressional certified vote totals (available on Wiki), NEP exit polls (used by AP, NYT, and all major TV networks), and the US Census Bureau.
Good points. The other thing these numbers point out is that white voters who voted for Obama in 2008 — they stayed home rather than flip their votes to Romney in 2012. I don’t think it would have been easy to get them to flip their vote. They view all politicians as empty suits, but in 2008 this guy came along they thought was “special” and they turned out to vote for him. Then they realized he was just like the others so they just returned to their normal pattern of not voting.
The other reliable voting groups — they are succeptible to campaigns that scare them into voting, such as with Biden’s “gonna put ya’ll back in chains” remark. So it is not surprising that voter turnout increased for those groups in 2012.
Isn’t it nice to have a sensible conversation about this so we can learn the correct lessons before 2016?
Look at what happened in 2010 and 2014 when Obama was not on the ballot. That's what we will see in 2016.