"I don't think anyone on our side understood or comprehended how good their turnout was going to be," said Henry Barbour, a Republican committee man from Mississippi. "The Democrats do voter registration like a factory, like a business, and Republicans tend to leave it to the blue hairs."Republican says Democrats do it "like a business." Huh.
As I knocked on door after door in a black neighborhood in Columbus, it was clear that folks heard the Mitt/wingnut code-talking and that it pissed them off. They heard the endless disrespect of the President and the general contempt for anybody who is not white that has become the core message of the modern conservative movement. They heard it and they decided to kick Mitt’s ass in the voting booth.posted by octothorpe at 7:53 AM on November 8, 2012 [20 favorites]
Mitt’s “Vote for me, I’m white” strategy made my job of getting Obama supporters to the polls really easy.
When talking about AA voter turn out, I think mad props should go to urban radios. The last two days leading up to the election I was paired with a young AA man from Lorain, Ohio so I was exposed to Hip hop stations and they really contributed a great deal to the GOTV efforts. In between songs and in every AA talk radio they encouraged people like mad to stay in line, to vote and to report back any challenges they were having. They played Mittens saying: “I am not concerned about the very poor,” in every segment. This was repeated over and over again and then the presenter would say something like: show him that “you care” or “you matter” by staying in line and voting.posted by maudlin at 7:55 AM on November 8, 2012 [36 favorites]
The 2014 GOTV model should be repeated in every election. We really need to mobilize all of our forces.
“If I hear anybody say it was because Romney wasn’t conservative enough I’m going to go nuts,” Graham said. “We’re not losing 95 percent of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics and voters under 30 because we’re not being hard-ass enough.”-- Lindsey Graham (R,SC)
So, some post-2012 theories of the super PAC era.posted by shothotbot at 8:41 AM on November 8, 2012 [7 favorites]
12) I think when the dust settles we may find that super PACs were actually very influential in House elections -- huge bang for buck.
11) Opacity of ad spending and the utter black box of "field" make it really hard for political reporters to know what is really going on.
10) The headline is not $1B in outside spending didn't matter. The headline is that Team Obama fought Team Romney to a draw.
9) Let's do that math again. In a $2.6 *billion* presidential election, GOP outside groups netted a $200M spending advantage. Not that much.
8) The final net Team Romney outside spending advantage in general election, not including party $, was a mere $200M. http://bit.ly/WG2p46
7) It feels significant that in 04 and 12, the side that relied on outside spending more lost. But I don't know what.
6) No aspiring candidate will want to disarm. So they will have to be even more attuned to priorities of those who can finance super PACs.
5) Cashwise, Obama beat Romney + super PACs w/ an unprecedentedly big small-donor base. Dems who can't match it in future may get swamped.
4) There is now some strong evidence that the efficiency loss of outsourcing ads and field to outside groups is extremely high.
3) The big donors to super PACs either do not care about or actively support gay marriage. What does that mean for GOP?
2) super PACs allowed GOP establishment to take control of presidential primary from Tea Party -- but opposite happened in Senate primaries.
1) "$1B for nothing" is a vast overstatement. Possible Obama would have won a landslide w/out outside money.
Lindsay Graham has always been remarkably sane for a Republican.
"A pretty phenomenal piece of information was shared at this evening's fabulous WOW event in Cambridge. If you were to remove the U.S. LGBT population from the electorate, Mitt Romney would have won the popular election on Tuesday and may well have won the electoral college as well. This is quite an amazing testimony to how the LGBT population has evolved as a force in politics. Without our involvement and votes, our country would likely be on a very different trajectory today."posted by ericb at 9:57 AM on November 8, 2012 [9 favorites]
Gallup Special Report: The LGBT Vote in the 2012 Presidential Election.
Obama's support for marriage equality helped him win the election and helped us win the ballot initiatives. During this latest campaign, President Obama's support for gay-rights was never an issue used by Republicans against him. In fact, it worked to his advantage to energize progressives and young people.posted by ericb at 10:00 AM on November 8, 2012 [4 favorites]
... For as long as I have been in politics—which is all of my adult life—it has been “Washington groupthink” that gay issues are dangerous and only mean trouble for elected officials, even ones who are sympathetic to our cause. It is now a new day — one that has been a long time in coming. Politicians need to recognize that their embrace of us is not only the right thing to do, but leads to success at the ballot box.
Victoria Jackson On Obama's Win: 'I Can't Stop Crying, America Died'.And ...
Julie Brown as Victoria Jackson Tea Party Spokesmodel.
'Demoralized' Ann Coulter To Laura Ingraham: 'It's Over, There Is No Hope' (AUDIO).posted by ericb at 10:16 AM on November 8, 2012 [8 favorites]
Sarah Palin On Obama Victory: 'It's A Perplexing Time For Many Of Us Right Now' (VIDEO).
Rush Limbaugh On Obama's Win: 'I Went To Bed Last Night Thinking We'd Lost The Country' (AUDIO).
Grover Norquist: Why 2012 Election Was Actually Good For GOP (VIDEO).
Big cities - Obama: 69%I found that interesting in light of one complaint made about both campaigns and the debates--that they completely ignored urban issues.
Mid-sized cities - Obama: 58%
Small cities - Romney: 56%
Suburbs - Romney: 50%
Some College - Obama 49%Presumably the "College" and "Postgrad" categories combine to make the overall 50/48 split you reference (the "Postgrad" group is quite a lot smaller, so it looks to me like the numbers do add up that way).
College - Romney 51%
Postgrad - Obama 55%
You can tell that neither party has fully grappled with the outcome of the election yet by observing how closely Republicans and Democrats resemble dogs sniffing each others’ backsides.posted by cavalier at 11:44 AM on November 8, 2012 [1 favorite]
The Republican party is a cascade of symptoms right now. And it's very hard to see a way out of it. It has managed to construct an almost perfect Newtonian hall of mirrors — for each solution, there is within the party an equal, but opposite problem. There is almost no way to function within the party structure as it has been redefined by the various elements of the conservative "movement" without rounding a corner and colliding with the image of itself coming in the other direction.posted by tonycpsu at 2:57 PM on November 8, 2012 [4 favorites]
I find myself wondering if FOX, for whatever reason, was setting-up Rove that night. What got me wondering was an offhand comment Kelly made as she was negotiating the hallways back to the election room. She was talking about the microphone reception and she said "When we rehearsed this earlier today..."They could have planned for the possibility of having some sort of check-in with the numbers people at some point. It seems pretty unlikely that the plan beforehand was for Rove to dispute the numbers.
Now...Why would you rehearse scrambling back to the number-crunching room? It's almost as if they knew Rove was going to have a melt-down.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing among conservatives of the Rush/Hannity school in the last few days, a lot of concern about this outreach question, and honestly, the tone of the discussion is beginning to sound like the last days of a failed 1950s marriage. The husband who's gone all day at work comes home and throws his hands up in the air in mock frustration: what do you want from me, another Cadillac? Another fur coat? I just got you new shoes last week!posted by tonycpsu at 3:05 PM on November 8, 2012 [35 favorites]
And the wife, who's loved this man for 20 years despite his abject stupidity, just sighs. All she wants her husband to do is listen to her, or take a day off work sometime and take her for a drive in the country, or make some spontaneous show of affection, maybe popping home for lunch like in the old days – just some evidence that he's even faintly aware of what's going on in her head. But when they try to talk it out, things just get worse, because in his very manner of asking her what's wrong, all hubby does is reveal that he thinks of his wife entirely as a nagging, financial parasite who's always on his ass about something.
Similarly, the fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party. A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.
But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average "illegal," as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.
Can I just say how delighted I am that the supposedly negative name the Republicans came up with for the ACA is now basically its real name (in the colloquial sense)?Historically, a lot of names for music and art movements (e.g., "Impressionism") originated as derisive terms from detractors and were eventually embraced by the artists themselves.
Clinton's job approval rating ranged from 36% in mid-1993 to 64% in late 1993 and early 1994.[1] In his second term, his rating was consistently ranged from the high-50s to the high-60s.[1][2] After his impeachment proceedings in 1998 and 1999, Clinton's rating reached its highest point at 73% approval.[3] He finished with a Gallup poll approval rating of 68%,[4] higher than that of every other departing president measured since Harry Truman.[4](There goes that magical 47% again -- twice.)
As he was leaving office, a CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup poll revealed 45% said they'd miss him. While 55% thought he "would have something worthwhile to contribute and should remain active in public life", 68% thought he'd be remembered for his "involvement in personal scandal", and 58% answered "No" to the question "Do you generally think Bill Clinton is honest and trustworthy?". 47% of the respondents identified themselves as being Clinton supporters. 47% said he would be remembered as either "outstanding" or "above average" as a president while 22% said he would be remembered as "below average" or "poor".[5]
Sam Wang final meta-margin prediction: O +2.46% i.e. had Romney won the PV by 2.46% the election, would have been in dead heat.The meta-margin is the amount the polls would have had to have been wrong by, on average, for the election to have been a dead heat, not the amount Romney would have to win the popular vote by for the election to be a dead heat.
I'm a lefty and I'm a total fan of having a huge and awesome military.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chance for Peace speech, April 16, 1953
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Here's a word that hasn't popped up in the various post-mortems of the election so far: Occupy.posted by homunculus at 7:57 PM on November 8, 2012 [11 favorites]
From the start, it's been my opinion that the very least you could say about the movement was that people were yelling at the correct buildings. And, I agree with Todd Gitlin in that the first iteration of the movement pushed things about as far as it possibly could. But its effect on the election just passed could not be more profound, and it should not be ignored — though it likely will be — by the rest of the people trying to make sense of What It All Means. Occupy changed the national dialogue. Willard Romney's surreptitiously taped comments about "the 47 percent" would not have had the resonance they did had the Occupy movement not gotten the country talking about the 99 percent and the one percent. It created a new rhetorical paradigm that simply would not have been there had it not been originally shouted at the correct buildings. And it was that new paradigm that triumphed Tuesday night.
[Massachusetts Governor] Deval Patrick and his wife will be in Washington to have dinner with the Obamas tonight. He says it's just a dinner "among friends," but rumors have been swirling that he could be in line for a Cabinet position.posted by ericb at 12:30 PM on November 9, 2012
Among the more prolific polling firms, the most accurate by this measure was TIPP, which conducted a national tracking poll for Investors’ Business Daily. Relative to other national polls, their results seemed to be Democratic-leaning at the time they were published. However, it turned out that most polling firms underestimated Mr. Obama’s performance, so those that had what had seemed to be Democratic-leaning results were often closest to the final outcome.posted by ericb at 11:40 AM on November 11, 2012
Conversely, polls that were Republican-leaning relative to the consensus did especially poorly.
"Shops at Dulles Airport outside Washington have knocked prices on their Romney gear down 75% - a better bargain than at Reagan Airport, where the discount is only 60%."*posted by ericb at 12:58 PM on November 11, 2012 [1 favorite]
HOLY WHITE PEOPLE, BATMAN!!! Wow, you’re thinking – this is not some Mexirican in the Sun Belt we need to attract via harsh anti-Castro policies or appeals to “valores de familia” - this is the BREAD AND BUTTER OF THE GRAND OLD PARTY, a Mayflower-descended small business owner, burdened by taxation, looking out for his beautiful White family in the suburbs of a city (St Louis) surrounded by racial tension and urban blight!posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:50 PM on November 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
How can I put this gently? My wife and I are not sensitive to your messaging, nor did we vote for the candidates you proposed for us this past Tuesday.
B-b-but, what? Aren’t we investors, hard-workin’ white folk surrounded by same in a manicured cul-de-sac, scared by a vision of economic collapse amidst the takers in a land of fewer givers? Didn’t Mitt Romney’s strong family, wealth, leadership history and chiseled chin give us the uncontrollable urge to high-five him into the White House?
No.
But the key thing to note is what happened when the conservatives lost, notably in 2006 and 2008. One possible response would have been to realize that the party had become too extreme and tack back toward the center. We know that didn’t happen, as illustrated by the dark red influx of 2010. Between principle and pragmatism, Republicans chose principle.posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:59 AM on November 15, 2012
Why do Republicans behave this way? There are many reasons. The funding that they need to win elections comes largely from a small number of extremely conservative power brokers such as the Koch brothers. Widespread gerrymandering means that elections are settled at the primary stage, where the power of far-right groups (Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, etc.) places a premium on ideological purity. (For whatever reason, the trend toward the extreme has been much weaker among Democrats.)
Two decades ago, conservatives liked to argue that the ivory tower had put academics out of touch with reality, and that conservatism had reason and science on its side. The recent collapse of communism seemed to confirm this view. Today the tables have turned. While academia certainly still has pockets of out-of-touch leftists, there has been a much more dramatic decline in intellectual standards on the political right.TPM: Ryan: It ‘Looked Like We Stood A Pretty Good Chance Of Winning’ On Election Day
National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru has one of the better election post-mortems out there, and I think it ties into some of the themes running through my piece earlier this week on how to understand Patrick J. Buchanan’s political thinking and career.posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:48 AM on November 16, 2012 [1 favorite]
After running through a compendium of indicators that the GOP has become a weak party (lost popular vote in five of six presidential elections, never achieves a hold on the Senate, etc), Ponnuru comes to the point that the upheaval of the late ’60s that tilted so many Southerners and ethnic Catholics into the GOP’s presidential coalition never resulted in these middle-class and working-class white voters trusting the GOP with their economic interests.
The Republican Party has been doing a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing since the presidential election. Half the conservative columnists and bloggers say the GOP lost because it overemphasized social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The other half says the party didn't emphasize them enough. And everyone denounces Project ORCA, the campaign's attempt to turn out voters via technology.posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:14 PM on November 18, 2012
But I've got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.
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posted by slapshot57 at 7:26 AM on November 8, 2012 [34 favorites]