Everybody pretty much stopped paying attention after Mitt Romney conceded Florida two days after the election, but something odd was still happening. Barack Obama's vote kept growing.
This is important because Republicans everywhere are continuing to insist that Obama has no mandate, despite winning more popular and electoral votes than George W. Bush and a greater share of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did.
The margins are getting hard to argue with though.
Obama’s victory was more decisive than Bush’s in ’04: And here’s one final observation about the 2012 race. Per the excellent work by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, Obama’s national lead over Romney continues to expand as votes keep on coming in. It’s now Obama 50.9%, Romney 47.4%. That’s a bigger (and more decisive) margin than Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 (which was Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.2%). What’s more, the president’s lead has grown to close to 3 points in Ohio, 4 points in Virginia and 6 points in Colorado. One doesn’t win Colorado by six points without winning swing voters; there isn’t a big-enough Democratic base to make that argument.
When I made my prediction on November 2, I was upfront about giving Colorado to Obama based solely on a gut feeling I had. I awarded New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado out of a sense of caution and pity, but I also said that I wouldn't be at all surprised if all three went to Obama.
I was privately telling friends, just as I was telling you, that this race would be between 3 and 5 points for the President, and he wound up winning by 3.5%. But the shocker is Colorado, where I never would have predicted a six point margin of victory. That's a huge margin for a swing state that every poll aggregator listed as too close to call right up until election day.
By all rights, the GOP should have gone into this year expecting to pick up a net of three or four Senate seats. Indeed, I only downgraded my prediction over the summer. But they underperformed even beyond my expectations, losing a net of two seats.
Then there's the House, where Nancy Pelosi was hallucinating when she said that they would win 25 seats and control. Redistricting after 2010 was never going to allow for that. But I figured that the Tea Party, which is concentrated in the House of Representatives, was unpopular enough that the Democrats could pick up between two and five seats. Instead, the won eight, taking out Tea Party heroes Allen West and Joe Walsh in the process and coming awfully close to beating Michele Bachmann. Up-and-coming Tea Party star Mia Love, who was supposed to be anointed rather than elected, lost her race in Utah.
As those House races are being finalized, I find myself reminded of 1998, when the GOP was supposed to pick up something like 20 or 30 House seats in the wake of the Clinton fellatio scandal. When the Republicans wound up only winning five, Newt Gingrich was forced to resign by the end of the week.
Having said all of that, I don't blame Mitt Romney for this. Did he make a number of unforced errors? Absolutely, although it is hilarious that he wound with 47% of the vote. As I've said over and over again, Romney was probably the best candidate running that wasn't Jon Hunstman, who was never going to be nominated. To this day, no one has been able to tell me which declared candidate was going to do better than Romney did.
Presidential nominees also don't historically have "reverse coattails" in Congress. George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis all lost by much wider margins than Romney did, but the Democrats held on the House. Even as George H.W Bush was losing the presidency, the GOP managed to pick up congressional seats.
This is different, but don't try telling Romney's chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, that.
There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?
Yes, the Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.
While I'll grant you that Mr. Stevens does an awesome job of self-justification, the numbers suggest something different.
Having an African-American at the top of the ticket does not cause a disaster like the GOP faced in the Senate, nor does it cause the party to lose more House seats than it should have. The spread in Ohio shouldn't have been three points and Colorado most definitely shouldn't have been six.
I've been saying for years now that the strongest thing Barack Obama had going for him was the lack of a primary or a third-party challenge from the left. Without those two things, an incumbent president would have had to be Herbert Hoover to lose. Everybody sing it with me, "Incumbent presidents don't often lose."
As for Obama's money, the abandonment of federally funded presidential races pretty much guarantees that every major party nominee is going to have at least a billion dollars. With Citizens United as the law of the land, the starting cost for a presidential election is going to be about $6 billion. So what?
To be fair, Stevens isn't wrong, at least not historically. But the changing demographics of America are making the history irrelevant. Since 1964, Republicans have relied on the white vote more than they should. But as James Carville explains, that's no longer tenable.
Even Democrats thought the Republicans would have more success in turning out people who hate Obama. But according to the numbers, Romney's vote may not even match McCain's. Why weren't people fired up and ready to go on the right-wing side?
It looks like the turnout was a little down. What was surprising to me is the model they used for the white vote. The white vote in '08 was 74 percent of the vote, and that's what they were counting on this time. But according to population trends, the white vote should be 72 percent – and it actually came in at 72. And it will be under 70 in 2016. What the Republicans have is some form of a progressive disease, like diabetes – it's just going to keep getting worse until they address it.
The demographics are a creeping cancer for them, in other words.
Yes. Every four years, the white vote goes to minus two – and it's picking up steam. From 1948 to 1992, it went from 91 to 87 percent. From '92 to 2016, it's going to go from 87 to 70.
Combine that with the youth vote. It was 54 percent for Kerry, and it was 66 for Obama in '08. This year it was 60 for Obama. Remember, the greatest predictor of how you're going to vote when you're 54 is how you voted when you're 24.
The Republicans don't have any choice but to deal with this. The question is how they deal with it. Older whites are like bloody marys when you have a hangover – you just have to go back to them, but eventually they're going to catch up with you. You go down to the hotel lobby and say, "I'm shaking – I have to have a bloody mary." The Republicans keep drinking them, and they're very productive in off years, like 2010.
I'm not even sure that the white vote is going to create tsunamis like 2010 for very much longer. Redistricting and gerrymandering has pretty much locked in the House for the next decade, give or take maybe ten seats. And it should be remembered that suicidal Tea Party primaries were causational in the GOP under performing in a wave year, like 2010.
The trend in Republican primaries isn't as likely to reverse as it to accelerate. As older and whiter voters become even more powerful in primaries, the candidates they nominate are likely to be less and less electable in general elections. In the last two cycles, the party has thrown away perfectly good Senate seats for no reason at all. My prediction is that you'll see more lunatic Republican general election candidates like Todd Aikin, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller, not fewer of them.
Look no further than what the activist wing of the party is proposing. They now want to take out Senator Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia primary. And Georgia is getting a lot closer than it has any business being. John McCain only won it by 8 points four years ago, and Mitt Romney did marginally worse. George W. Bush won Georgia by twelve points in 2000 and seventeen four years later. If dragging the party further to the populist right is showing diminishing returns in Georgia, imagine how well it'll work everywhere else. If they succeed in beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, I now predict that seat will go to a Democrat.
Scott Brown was pushed by the Tea Party to the point that Elizabeth Warren was elected. Olympia Snowe was so frustrated with the idiot wing of the party that she quit altogether and essentially gave her seat to Angus King. That's six seats, enough for the majority. If Lisa Murkowski didn't choose to caucus with the GOP out of the goodness of her heart, it would have been seven. And Republicans were lucky that Arlen Specter lost the Democratic primary after he was forced out of the GOP because he might have held that seat, too, bringing the total to eight.
Conservatives are no making the same stupid mistake that liberals used to. They're subtracting from the electorate and thinking they can win, while the other side is adding to it. If you want to know why the Democrats lost seven out ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, look no further than that. But the Republicans won the popular vote in only one of the last six, which is an even more worrying trend.
Instead of looking at what I've just written seriously, Stu Stevens writes an op-ed for the Washington Post that basically says, "Don't worry. We just lost to a colored with bank. It happens." That sounds a lot like "The fundamentals remain strong." But they aren't, as anyone with a passing familiarity with math can tell you.
Yes, Romney won the middle class. Yippie! But the middle class in America has been diminishing for twenty years now, largely evaporating with the manufacturing base that created it in the first place. Bringing the middle class back to the level of the electorate that they were in just 1996 is going to require levels of economic growth so unrealistic that it looks more like wishful thinking than political strategy.
Not only did Romney hit a historic low with non-Cuban Hispanics, the GOP lost Cubans for the first time that I'm aware of. And not only are they continuing to lose blacks (by 93%), Jews (by 31) and Catholics (by 7), they're losing Asians, too (by 26).
All of those groups are growing as a percentage of the population, and several are concentrated in key swing states, like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. Ignore all the nonsense of national polls showing a "50-50 country." The Electoral College and the composition of the Senate make that meaningless.
You're starting to hear the right noises from some factions of the GOP, but I fully expect them to be drowned out or threatened into silence within about a month, maybe two.
If you think "We don't have to change anything" is a sound political strategy, I look forward to seeing what the future has in store for you.
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