Marc_C wrote:Tony Crocker wrote:It's always speculation what causes last minute swings like this. The best guess for 2012 is Hurricane Sandy,...
You're completely ignoring the near total alienation by Romney and the American Taliban of women, Latinos, African-Americans, and anyone who desires a candidate who actually has positions that s/he maintains and believes in. Sandy may have helped out a bit, but the prime reasons for Romney's resounding defeat are systemic in a party that has traveled so far to the radical right that even Regan could not be their candidate today because he would be considered too leftist. The American majority heard the same failed policies and economic remedies that favor the wealthy the Rethuglicans have been pushing for over a decade and wisely rejected them. Read what Frum, Sullivan, Jindal, Rubio, et al on the right have said about how Mittens went off the rails, and, especially, this piece by Bruce Bartlett in The American Conservative: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community
I'm not sure how we ended up with a political discussion on a ski board, but I would dispute many of your assertions in the above quote. (and, for the record, I held my nose and voted for Obama, but, hey, I live in Massachusetts and would have been killed by my friends and neighbors and family members if I had admitted to voting for Romney). I'm certainly not defending the campaign that Romney ran or his many varying positions on the issues and mistatements and political missteps. I'm also skeptical that, even if Romney had been elected, that he would be any more successful at dealing with the myriad problems this country faces than Obama has been. However, I'm not sure that I would classify this election as "resounding defeat" for Romney. Obama won 26 states and Romney won 24 states; more interestingly, though, if you look at a map of the election results on a county by county basis across the entire US, Romney won a majority of the votes in over 90% of the country (on a geographic basis). And if we broke down the voting results even further by looking at voting precinct by voting precinct, Romney's "victory" across the entire country would be even much larger than 90%. Admittedly, he lost that other 10% - primarily the "inner city vote" by overwhelming majorities and this was enough to put Obama ahead in the larger states with many electoral votes. Furthermore, if there had been a switch of just over 340,000 votes (out of over 110 million total votes cast) in four of the swing states, Mitt Romney would be the new President. When you break down the vote by income segments, Obama won the "poor" vote - those making below $30,000 - with over 65% of that voting segment or by over 7 million votes and he won the overall election by about 3.5 million votes. Obama lost almost all of the other income segments, but not by enough of a margin to overcome that huge advantage he had in the "under $30,000" vote. With respect to the "woman vote", Romney won 45% of that total voting block (but, again, Obama won enormous, stupendous majorities of the black and hispanic "poor" woman vote, skewing his overall majority among women). I would not classify this a "total alienation" of women. Overall, this was an extremely narrow victory by Obama by almost every measure available. It was certainly not the overwhelming mandate that LBJ won in defeating Goldwater in 1964 or that Nixon attained in defeating McGovern in 1972 or even that Reagan won in beating Jimmy Carter in 1980.