Mitt Romney ran such a lousy, moderate, uninspiring campaign that a few million Republicans just decided to stay home (in the most important election of our lifetime). There's just one problem with that statement--it's completely FALSE. It never made any sense, and we now have the facts to show that it is not true. Michael Medved explains:
First, Romney did NOT get a lower popular vote total than did McCain: He polled almost a million votes more (983,000 more, to be precise) and earned 33 additional electoral votes. It was Obama whose vote totals went down sharply, with 3,592,000 fewer votes than the first time.
The mistaken talking point about the "missing Republicans" came from the slow nature of the counting process. In the first few days after the election, millions of votes remained untallied, but even after the completed numbers came in, showing more GOP voters than 2008, few of the conclusion jumpers bothered to correct, or even adjust their post-election remarks.
Moreover, exit polls show that the electorate featured an unusually high percentage of both Republicans and conservatives, rather than offering any scrap of evidence for complaints over a disengaged base. In 2012, self-identified Republicans comprised precisely the same percentage of the electorate as in 2008, and gave even more overwhelming support (93% compared to 90%) to their party's nominee. What's more, conservatives not only made up a slightly higher percentage of the voters in 2012 than four years earlier, but even turned out more strongly as a percentage of electorate than they did for the victorious George W. Bush in 2004.
And what about the obsessive media mantra about Evangelical rejection of the GOP ticket because of distrust of Mitt Romney's Mormon faith? Actually, white "Evangelical" or "Born Again" Christians showed up in proportionately higher numbers for Romney than for McCain or, for that matter, for their fellow-Evangelical George W. Bush. This segment of the electorate amounted to 23% of all voters in 2004, but 25% in 2012, with Romney scoring the same overwhelming level of support as did the outspokenly born-again Bush (78%).
He also explains how well Romney actually did with younger voters, and that the real problem with the Republican party is failure to appeal to minority voters.
Mitt made some mistakes, but it was not that he was not conservative enough, or that he should have talked more about social issues. He rightly ran on the economy, jobs and restoring America. Sadly, the majority of voters would not hear.
H/T: AZ. Thanks!
17 comments:
Bosman feel free to condense this if you want to.
Great find Martha. I missed this.
Not even Fox News bothered to set the record strait on the final numbers.
I also noticed yesterday that they did a piece on the Fisker car calamity with Lou Dobbs. The gist was that 'Didn't anyone see this coming'?
Romney brought it up in the debate and they conveniently forgo to mention that HE foresaw the mess and told Obama it was a big mistake.
Martha and Bosman, you guys seriously rock. Thanks for setting the record straight. I'm sharing this! True history and perception are two very different things, and nowhere was this more true than in the 2012 election. We did not have "false hope" that we would win. The excitement and huge numbers at the rallies were REAL. Voter fraud +/= unregistered immigrant voting did this.
Technically, we don't have a minority problem with illegal immigrants, either. They ARE the problem. We have a real refugee problem at the southern border, and until we figure out how to address it in a humane way without giving out free citizenship and welfare, we're going to be seen as bad guys for speaking common sense/acknowledging the problem.
Thanks to AZ for pointing this out to us! I also see that RomneyMan had a link in the chatbox, which I did not see before I posted.
-Martha
Medved's analysis has ONE MAJOR PROBLEM - he compares Romney's numbers with those of McCain and Bush, neither one of whom will ever be confused with Ronald Reagan in terms of voter popularity.
McCain lost his 2008 presidential bid by a whopping 7 points, while Bush squeaked out a 2-point victory in 2004 and LOST THE POPULAR VOTE in 2000.
Furthermore, McCain and Bush were NOT exactly conservative icons - both were viewed as RINO's by a large percentage of conservative voters.
I'm surprised that Medved, while he was at it, didn't dredge up the electoral numbers of Bob Dole and Gerald Ford in order to make Romney look even better.
The fact that Romney's performance among conservative voters matched or slightly exceeded that of Bush and McCain is NOTHING TO BRAG ABOUT, especially when you take into account Obama's ABSOLUTELY ABYSMAL RECORD over the last 4 years.
Romney should've won BY A LANDSLIDE, and in the process, TROUNCED the electoral performance of his two GOP predecessors.
Total nonsense. The voter pool has also changed dramatically in the past two decades. Comparing his numbers to Reagan's and Obama's to Carter's would be truly disingenuous. Not even Reagan would have beat Obama in a landslide. It was close in 2012. If it hadn't been so close, we wouldn't all be so frustrated right now. But it was close, close enough to feel our once-majority slipping away. I would say to everyone on the right, stop scapegoating.
We were lucky someone as qualified and squeaky clean as Mitt Romney ran for us. We will be even luckier if he does it again.
Newark, ha ha ha ha ha.
You are living in a dream world, my friend.
-Martha
It's absolutely comical how the same people who predicted a LANDSLIDE ROMNEY WIN before the election, did a complete 180 after the election, insisting over and over again that he never had a chance against Obama.
Even some of Romney's closest advisors, such as John Sununu, were predicting "A BLOWOUT WIN" for Romney a few weeks before the election.
Romney himself, in a recent interview, told Chris Wallace that he expected to win Florida easily, and was SHOCKED when the numbers began to roll in from the Sunshine State on election day.
Romney's horribly inaccurate internal polling operation was symbolic of his entire campaign, as was his disastrous get-out-the-vote effort on election day.
I supported Romney as much as anybody, but at the same time, I am intellectually honest enough to recognize the fact that he made MAJOR MISTAKES in strategy, tactics and execution throughout the campaign.
Romney loyalists who still claim that he ran a great campaign, but just never had a chance against the Obama juggernaut, are simply engaging in revisionist history in order to save face.
"Denial", as Mark Twain famously wrote, "ain't just a river in Egypt."
@ Katrina
Reagan wouldn't have defeated Obama in a landslide?!?!?
Yes, the voter pool has changed since 1984, but it hasn't changed THAT much.
And BTW, if you think Romney has any intention of running again, or has any chance of winning the nomination if he did run, you need to have your head examined.
Thank you for the free diagnosis. I'll take that for what it's worth. We believed he would win in a landslide because we believed we still had a solid majority of conservatives. So if Romney got more votes than Bush and still lost, clearly that majority has been lost. I believe unfettered borders and Democrat registration initiatives for Non-citizens had a lot to do with this shift. Generally, polling companies didn't pay tons of attention to this changing dynamic because these Non-citizens didn't have the right to vote. Remember that GOP election workers weren't allowed into some polling locations. We can safely assume people voted who shouldn't have been granted that privilege. We can also assume this is the new normal.
About Reagan, he had many in the mainstream press who loved him. He had a charisma that translated on camera. But he was not as accomplished as Mitt Romney. Elections are not about qualifications, unfortunately. But yeah, I'm going to defend Mitt Romney. The man is a saint. When they couldn't find dirt on him, they invented gaffes, pretending "binders full of women" was an insult instead of the tool of a revolutionary leader who brought equal representation of women to Massachusetts. Many people still don't grasp the context of the phrase they love to use as a punchline. That's the raw, powerful stupidity we were up against as Romney supporters. You can't fight stupid.
And I'll even let you have the last word just to prove that point.
Newark, you have all the answers don't you? Ha ha.
I did not predict a Romney landslide, but I did believe he would win in a close race. I guess I believed people were smarter than they are. I didn't believe the American people would actually want 4 more years of damage when they could have Mr. Fix-it. Just didn't make sense to me.
I do find it hard to believe you wanted Romney to win, based on the things you write here. You bash Romney so viciously that it's hard to take you seriously.
Romney didn't run the lousy campaign you talk about--not even close. He ran a better campaign than almost anyone could have. There are plenty of reasons why he lost, but yours just aren't true.
-Martha
@ Martha
I've been posting comments on this website since the fall of 2011, so my support of Romney's candidacy is well-documented.
You should be aware of the fact, if you aren't already, that Michael Medved is a HUGE SUPPORTER of "comprehensive immigration reform", i.e. amnesty, citizenship and voting rights for illegal aliens.
The Medved article that you linked to was more about persuading Republicans to agree with him on immigration reform - although he took great pains not to specifically mention that issue - than it was about objectively analyzing the 2012 presidential election results.
I found it quite bizarre that Medved didn't mention even once the most important statistic of the election - the 20-point gender gap between the two major party candidates, the largest such gap in recorded history.
I guess Medved was too busy pushing GOP outreach to Hispanic voters to notice the fact that Romney lost the female vote by 12 points, the same female vote that accounted for 53% of the electorate, more than 5 times that of Hispanic voters.
Call me crazy, but I think the GOP will be far better served if it focuses its voter outreach efforts on female voters instead of Hispanic voters, since the former comprise a far larger percentage of the electorate than the latter do.
I have to say that I figured that Romney would win b/c I didn't think people in America were that stupid to re-elect Obama. I actually said to someone the day after the election "I underestimated the stupidity of the American people." I honestly felt that something was going on in this country and that more and more people were getting fed up with this current administration. I talked to lots of people who voted for Obama in 2008 who said they had enough. I have talked and talked to people since the election about why they voted for Obama and am still shocked at the stupid reasons they give. Also Mitt may not have been a great politician, but I was proud to support him as a person--as someone who had integrity and class--on a totally different level than Obama, who put up with so many lies and biases against him from the Obama campaign and the media--like nothing I've ever seen before. Obama is not Jimmy Carter--he may believe similar policies, but I don't think Carter was nearly as corrupt and deceptive. We all talked about how small and desparate of a campaign Obama was running at the end. Many conservatives thought Mitt would win and said many good things about him leading up to the day of the election. They felt like I did that he had momentum, except of course Hurricane Sandy threw that off a bit. But those same people trashed him right after he lost the election. Like Mike Huckabee said, if they didn't say these things about him before the election when they felt he had a good chance to win, why are they critisizing him so much afterwards as if they knew he would lose? hindsight is 20/20. let me just say the whole country would be a lot better off if it weren't for the lying, sell-out media who is only interested in ratings and their own agenda-who cares if it's true or accurate?
Newark,
The problem is that your kind of candidate - the ones you've mentioned in the past - are sure losers for us.
I don't really care what Medved's motivation for the article is, the poll numbers don't lie.
And Romney did poorly with women because of people like Akin, Santorum, Mourdock, and Rush who say stupid things that repel women.
It didn't have anything to do with Romney. No one in our party has a better record with women.
-Martha
Anon @ 1:43. So true. And FOX is right in there with them. They helped defeat Mitt, too.
-Martha
Problem with this article is Bush had over 1.2 million more R votes than Rmoney.
Secondly Rmoney is on video in support of just about all of Obama's policies, YouTube it.
So why would we want 8 more possible years of Rmoney style Obama policy when we can have just 4 years of the real thing? Makes no sense supporting 8 years over 4 years in that respect.
Third, I know many an R that did not vote for Rmoney. It is simple to deduce given the RNC chicanery during the Primary. Remember at least the nonsense that happened in Tampa? Think Ron Paul. I am one of those that fall in that category. Some didn't vote, some wrote Ron Paul in and some like me Voted Libertarian. I voted Libertarian the second election in a row because of the idiot that was nominated.
You can spin it however you like but the facts are there if you choose to look for them. There were far more reason not to Vote R this election than the previous and to assume they did because you think McLame was the standard to go by is laughable... McLame was nearly as Bad as Rmoney and that was before Ron Paul's crowds in the primary dwarfed Rmoney's...
Eraserve, at first I was worried your perspective might be a popular one, but then I read the final line and realized you live in an alternate reality where Ron Paul has crowds even close to Romney's. Ha ha. Thanks for reminding me that some people are just operating in a seperate reality.
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