Editorial
Editorial Epilogue – Why Obama Won Nov. 2012
But let us put a few things into context: Romney won more white voters than any other Republican had won since 1988. He also managed to sweep Indiana and North Carolina back to the Republican camp – states that Obama had won in 2008. Seniors, most white men and married women went for Romney, and that was it for the Republicans.
How They Lost Their Way
On the other hand, the GOP lost Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Nebraska and Maine.
Except for Massachusetts and Maine, Republican losses in the other states were simply self-imposed. In fact, a case can be made that both Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost their Senate bids because Almond & Verba were right: The American citizen is more on the “downward flow” side of politics and not as squarely Republican or Democratic as their partisans would like to think. Exit polls and the overall results on Election Day showed that Americans do not appreciate those who talk of rape, gay rights issues and even marijuana in extreme terms.
In the same vein, we are now certain that Mitt Romney lost the states of Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Pennsylvania simply because each of these states’ Republican governors tried to disenfranchise voters to benefit the GOP. Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott, reduced the number of early voting days from 14 days to 8 in what is widely considered an attempt to prevent minorities from voting since Democrats were the kind to vote before so that they could work on Election Day.
This backfired as it led many African Americans and Latinos in Florida to turn up, brave the long lines and 10-page ballot paper to give Obama their vote. For the first time in more than 3 decades, Cuban Americans in Florida voted Democrat and it seems as though Mr. Romney’s primary season anti-immigrant rhetoric had come back to bite him. Obama received more than 70 percent of the Latino vote and also, 93 percent of the African American vote – almost as much as he received the first time around.
We could go on and on about where we were right and where Obama’s people go it right. But the crucial thing here is how wrong the Republicans were. They had put their blinders on and focused on what their own people – Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, the Weekly Standard and many others – were saying. They were, instead, indolent about mobilizing their own people and the more than 10 million Obama vote deficit over 2008 could have been the white voters Romney needed to make his requisite 61 percent majority for electoral success.
In summation, Romney ran a worse than lackadaisical campaign. On top of the aforementioned blinders and their self inflicted losses, an illustration of this incompetence rests on their Project Orca. What was supposed to be his secret weapon at the polls – one meant to let volunteers search for and mark off Romney supporters, and get those who had not voted to the booth – collapsed under a deluge of data simply because it had not been beta tested with real field information. In the end, their own software cost them thousands of votes and the actions and Obama’s victory left the Republicans doing the Coulda Woulda Shoulda.
