Flip side: didn't Romney come awful close to winning?

The election was not a landslide victory for Obama. As others posted, It could have gone the other way. If Romney won Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado, the numbers would have been reversed.

The only way you can declare a landslide is by popular vote numbers, not by winning a majority of the swing states by a point or two.

This is why we need to split electoral college votes.

 

Marco Rubio immediately comes to mind.

 

Agreed- he'd click a couple of boxes, but the racist majority of the GOP are going "birther" on him:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/birthers-now-claim-sen-marco-rubio-isnt-a-natural-born-citizen/

 

If Romney had won two of the biggest states in the country along with Virginia and Colorado he would have won. That's awesome. LOL

If the Astros would have scored a few more runs every game, they could have won the World Series.

 

All this talk of "The two parties aren't really different. Give them power, and power corrupts. Get down to it and it doesn't matter who wins," is so much bull ****. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, who serve for life. For good or ill, depending on where you stand, those justices interpret our laws, say what is legal, what is not.

They often have very close votes. They picked a president in 2000 who many believe did not actually win. They picked him anyway by a partisan 5-4 vote. They decided recently that the best place for campaign finance laws was the trash can. By a 5-4 vote. That led to easily the most expensive election in American history, with the wealthy and Corporate America, on both sides, trying their damnedest to buy the result. They recently ruled against someone who was underpaid by a large amount during her entire career because she was a woman, and by a huge American corporation, Goodyear, and that was a 5-4 vote. The "reason" given? She didn't file a complaint within 180 days of being hired. Despite the fact that she didn't know she was being subjected to sex and wage discrimination. Today, she receives a smaller retirement check simply for being a woman. She wasn't reimbursed for past lost wages.

Hell yes, it matters who wins, and pardon my strong opinion, but anyone who thinks it does not is an idiot.

 

The problem is that the latter two cheap shots resonate with a lot more people and rationalize a lot more structural and historical social inequities than not, so they're not as even-handed or constructive as you'd be inclined to purport.

 

So? Since Romney won Indies by winning ex-Republican now Tea Party independents, does that change anything? No. Take the TP Indies out of the Indie category and it looks much more like the traditional Indie block... and Obama won that group.

 

I still think a Romney-type without the overt disavowing of half his accomplishments and political career would actually do great with independents going forward, though. Genuine shame in that if the guy wanted to he could have turned his whole story into a narrative about the complexities and constraints of leadership in a partisan climate.

 

I'll agree. It was not a landslide win. Merely a dominant one.

Also, on the stereotype question, I think it is fair to say that if you support a party that has based their policies and politics on appealing to the resentment of others (and there is ample evidence built up from Nixon's Southern Strategy through Atwater and into today that this is the case with Republicans), it is fair to make some generalizations. Even if individual supporters of the party are not racist in their personal outlook, on some level they have to realize that they are strengthening a party and politicians that use racism in the pursuit of power, however subtle it may be. If you recognize it and do nothing to change the politicians and the party you support, then what difference does it make? You may not be overtly racist in your personal life, but you are covertly racist in your political life. Likewise, if you don't think of yourself as personally racist and yet you don't realize that the politicians and party you support are using race to a political advantage, that says something about your racist underpinnings that maybe you can't face. Look at the photos of people who attended Romney rallies and those that attended Obama rallies and ask yourself why is there such a stark difference in the way those audiences look?

That said, of course there are good and decent people in the Republican Party. If you're one of them and you don't want to be stereotyped as a racist or racist supporter, get to work and change your party so the stereotype no longer applies.

And I will say that I come from the racism is America's original sin school. I think we're all racist to some degree. It's just that some people are more honest with themselves and are able to recognize it, deal with it, and do what they can to not pass as much of the attitude to the next generation, but we all have at least a little blind spot in our character where racism resides. (Some of the most racist folks I've known were oblivious Liberals who worship MLK.) The difference is that the Democratic Party bases none of their appeal on racism and these Republican canards that Democrats are really the racist because they give stuff to poor people to keep them subservient and that blacks only vote for Obama because he is black and that Conservatives were the real heroes of the civil rights movement just prove the point. Just because your dog whistle is intended for certain breeds doesn't mean the rest of us mutts can't hear it too.

 

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RovF1zsDoeM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

You got to be kidding me. He is an anchor baby for Cuban nationals. His grandfather was a deported illegal. He is lucky that his mom and pop weren't deported, too.

 

1.

Wingers here complaining how Romney won "whites" and "independents" or coming close in "popular vote" is the equivalent of saying that the Rockets lost the game when they won "field goal percentage" and hat it's just the "3 pointers," "free throws," "turnovers" and "rebounds" that disfavored them.

The rules of the game are that (1) there is an Electoral College, (2) people are allowed to vote regardless of whether they are white or not and their votes count, and (3) both parties know these rules going into the contest.


2.

Here's a bit of "pro tip": Making complaints like "we won the white vote" isn't doing you any favors with non-white voters going forward. Also, thinking 48-51 loss in the popular vote means "we were close" isn't doing you any favors in future strategies, either.

3.

Given that we just went through an election where the Dems won partly due to a successful "microtargeting" operation (read Sasha Issenberg's "Victory Lab" for more on the election "moneyball" being played), analysis at such a rough level as the "white vote" isn't very helpful thinking. The GOP might have won the national white popular vote overall, but there is significant regional differences in how much they won by (a lot more in the South than elsewhere), as well as a split in terms of urban vs. rural white vote (I believe the GOP lost white votes in medium to large size cities), Evangelical vs. Catholic vs. non-religious white vote, and different education levels.

People really need to think which stats are the meaningful ones, and which, like FG% in basketball, are rather useless.

 

Great post. Folks should read the entire thing. It might hit too close to home for some of you.

 

So true. In 2000, every Dem I said this to didn't want to listen.

 

Hypothetical; if Obama had won Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, he would have been appointed emperor for life.

For those who want to play on the popular vote as some sort of symbol this thing was close, some of you seem to be forgetting that most of the deepest blue states were affected by, jeez, a hurricane.

 

Obama won convincingly in virtually every category.

Obama had 332 EV's vs. Romney's 206 EVs.
Obama won 50.5% of the popular vote vs. Romney's 47.9%.
Obama won every battleground state, except North Carolina.

Slice and dice it anyway you want, Obama won handily.

 

Here are the main reasons Romney lost.

Latinos are pissed about immigration reform (amnesty).

The majority of women voters are pro choice.

The majority of voters lean to the left on issues such as trade, taxes, and the safety net.

Most Americans still have strong memories of what Dubya did to America, and that rubbed off on Mitt.

Mitt has too many connections to Wall Street.

That's it.

 

You left out that the Republican leadership underestimated the intelligence of the American people. Not by a whole hell of a lot, but by enough.

 

what were the margins for those states?

 

Maybe, but you have to be honest and insightful enough to remember Fritz Mondale, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater. There's such a thing as a bad candidate and collective party failure; and Romney as a choice wasn't either of those things.