What happens when you make Mitt Romney your candidate

[fpb]

...the 2012 elections actually weren’t about a demographic explosion with non-white voters. Instead, they were about a large group of white voters not showing up.

As of this writing, Barack Obama has received a bit more than 60 million votes. Mitt Romney has received 57 million votes. Although the gap between Republicans and Democrats has closed considerably since 2008, Romney is still running about 2.5 million votes behind John McCain; the gap has closed simply because Obama is running about 9 million votes behind his 2008 totals.

(...)

...We can see that the counties clustered around Columbus in the center of the state turned out in full force, as did the suburban counties near Cincinnati in the southwest. These heavily Republican counties are the growing areas of the state, filled with white-collar workers.

Where things drop off are in the rural portions of Ohio, especially in the southeast. These represent areas still hard-hit by the recession. Unemployment is high there, and the area has seen almost no growth in recent years.

My sense is these voters were unhappy with Obama. But his negative ad campaign relentlessly emphasizing Romney’s wealth and tenure at Bain Capital may have turned them off to the Republican nominee as well. The Romney campaign exacerbated this through the challenger’s failure to articulate a clear, positive agenda to address these voters’ fears, and self-inflicted wounds like the “47 percent” gaffe. Given a choice between two unpalatable options, these voters simply stayed home.

From: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/11/08/the_case_of_the_missing_white_voters_116106-2.html

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Obama in 2012 still got more votes than McCain in 2008, let alone Romney in 2012.

Many possible reasons for decline in turnout: disenchantment with Obama or with both candidates; voter suppression efforts; Hurricane Sandy; simple return to a more normal level of enthusiasm.

If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012 and back, 2008 is the outlier in turnout, at 62%. 2004 was high at 56% so there might be a recent trend, but several previous years were 50%. How many votes Obama got in 2008 has no recent precedent; his 2012 total is normalcy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There is a recent trend. Those who voted in the last few elections voted for different models of society. It was like the epic elections of 1945 in Britain, when Labour trashed the Tories; it was a real confrontation of views and values, and so people were mobilized. The fact is that Romney was not only a poor candidate as such, but an absolutely terrible candidate for the times. First, there is what Huckabee said of him in the last election: "You want a guy who looks like your next-door neighbour, not a guy who looks like he pink-slipped your next-door neighbour". Romney looks and sounds like an old-time man of power, down to his elegant touch of white around the hair on his cheek; Obama, by contrast, looks like a much more widely known and appreciated type - "an athletic university lecturer on loan to public affairs", to quote Trevor-Roper (who said it, alas, of Albert Speer). The impression is immediately positive. Second, there is the fact that we conservatives had watched Romney destroy Gingrich and Santorum by means of hate-ridden and destructive ads backed by his money power, and so were not impressed by his sudden discovery of the virtues of gentlemanly politeness. But above all, there is the complete incapacity of Romney to show any kind of moral vision, of overall idea for society. That, not Socialism, is what is killing politics in Europe: that all candidates from all sides are offering themselves as good managers who will run the economy well. That is not what will get people streaming to the ballot box, what will get them volunteering to knock on doors and distribute pamphlets, what will get them arguing with their neighbours. At a time when enormous issues of morality and public organization and legality are in play, the Republican leadership, may God never forgive them, thought they would win with a distant and uncommitted corporate type.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I'd love dueling good managers who could run the economy well. As I see it Europe's problem is that it doesn't actually have any at the moment.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, you'd love your idea of right and wrong triumphant and unchallenged. I've got news for you: it's not going to be. And if politics were about management, what would we need elections for? Just do like China and promote people by examination.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind, by the way, that I don't agree with this guy that "the 47% gaffe" was a gaffe. I thought it was the kind of thing that was commonplace in "fiscal conservative" circles (I have nothing and want nothing to do with these people, to be clear) and that, like Obama's incredibly damaging "people who bitterly cling to their guns and their religion", he felt he could say it among his own kind of people and because he never thought that the people he spoke about were real. It was a display of the commonplace assumptions of his set, and people were quite right to take it seriously.