Obama’s numbers went down, but Romney never inspired voters to vote
In retrospect, it looks like both campaigns fell short of their turnout goals. Yes, examination of election returns and exit polls indicates that the Obama campaign turned out voters where it really needed them.
That enabled him to carry Florida by 1 percent, Ohio by 3 percent, Virginia by 4 percent, and Colorado and Pennsylvania by 5 percent. Without those states he would have gotten only 243 electoral votes and would now be planning his presidential library.
But the conservative bloggers who argued that the Obama campaign’s early voting numbers were below target may have been right. If Mitt Romney had gotten 16 percent more popular votes than his predecessor, as John Kerry did, he would have led Obama by 4 million votes and won the popular vote 51 to 48 percent.
Romney, like Kerry, depended on voters’ distaste for the incumbent; he could not hope to inspire the devotion Bush enjoyed in 2004 and that Obama had from a diminished number in 2008.
Blowback
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Tell me something I wasn’t predicting more than a year in advance.
Stoic Patriot on December 26, 2012 at 5:23 PM
Good gosh, will y’all give this a rest? Mitt lost and bho(I won)won! That is the end of the story as far as the US going to crater more than you know is concerned!
L
letget on December 26, 2012 at 5:26 PM
Love ya, Michael, but you’re not exactly on the top of my analyst list right now. What did you say the electoral college count was going to be again?
“Just a bit outside.”
ConservativeLA on December 26, 2012 at 5:26 PM
too funny. Forgot all about that little predickshun.
arnold ziffel on December 26, 2012 at 5:30 PM
“Romney never inspired voters to vote”
Sadly, exactly.
CTSherman on December 26, 2012 at 5:31 PM
Which in layman’s terms simply means that there are too many stupid moochers in this country who vote like their freebies depend on it..
HotAirian on December 26, 2012 at 5:32 PM
So, does a fireman inspire someone to avoid a fire or is the thought of burning alive inspiration enough.
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 5:36 PM
The election was all about FREE STUFF, not about electing a president. For 2016, the goal of every thinking, taxpaying American must be to change the focus of the election from handouts for freeloaders, to electing a leader who will improve America for everyone – of course, over the next four years, obama’s goal is to create more (voting) freeloaders than (voting) taxpayers, so, we’ve got our work cut out for us.
Pork-Chop on December 26, 2012 at 5:40 PM
So Americans chose the fascist cuz the other guy — the one who was not a fascist — didn’t “inspire” them. There is simply no hope for a country like that. No hope at all. The phrase “game over, man” comes to mind.
Rational Thought on December 26, 2012 at 5:46 PM
Thanks Paultards and lazy asses for giving us another 4 years of Obama!
Happy now?
cntrlfrk on December 26, 2012 at 5:48 PM
Tagg Romney: There was nobody that wanted to be president less than Romney
Voters: There was nobody that we wanted less than Romney.
astonerii on December 26, 2012 at 5:49 PM
Interesting. Welcome to Obama’s America. I guess in 2012 we need a government program inspire people who are drowning to desire a life preserver.
Kataklysmic on December 26, 2012 at 5:49 PM
Yup. Welcome to the liberal’s infantilization of the population come to fruitition.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 5:54 PM
Even less than Obama?
No. What happened was that people couldn’t get from step one to step two of the thought process. They had to get past their emotions and feelings in order to think and they just didn’t have the wherewithal to do it.
RINO Romney was not a good conservative candidate, but he is light years better than Obama. There’s no way that any conservative could say differently.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 5:56 PM
*As predicted* by many people, the “electable” Romney’s strategy of appealing to the “undecided/moderates” ended in failure.
Seems voters actually want a candidate/message to vote for, not just poll-tested slogans and negative campaigns about how “bad” the other guy is…
Or, as a very good politician put it many years ago- NO PALE PASTELS!
(But will the GOP learn?)
cs89 on December 26, 2012 at 5:57 PM
Sounds like someone is trying to save some face there
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 5:58 PM
There people said it better than me. IF your waiting to be inspired by someone who clearly doesnt have the countries best interest at heart then what GOOD are you.
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:01 PM
Most voters are not absolute super high information voters.
Here is the problem… Obama is not blamed for his failures and no one but Marxists and conservatives see him as a Marxist. So you fail here with your argument.
Your argument gets worse when you look at the accomplishments and words of both candidates side by side. You can make a list of accomplishments and statements and would have to put a check mark next to each and every one of them for both candidates. Obama is the real deal and Romney was a carbon copy of Obama in almost every way. So even high information voters would have a hard time choosing between them on what matters, accomplishments and statements.
If that was not bad enough, Romney had no desire to win. Like Tagg said. He had every desire to be the nominee and no desire to actually be president.
That fits. He went absolute nuclear against all of the Republican candidates in his way, he had a huge amount of pent up hatred for conservatives. It is likely the only thing that motivated him to run.
When the general came around though, Obama was a nice guy in over his head. He paid 4 times the going rate for commercials which were lame on the inside and under represented in the airwaves on the outside. He paid ten times the rate for less than stellar advisers. He had less presence in swing states than Obama at a much higher burn rate. He tied much of the election on an untested Goliath program that failed. There was one moment and one moment at all in which I saw him trying to be my representative, the first Debate. After that it was back to being the representative of everyone on the left of center.
astonerii on December 26, 2012 at 6:01 PM
People of good conscience cannot easily sell something that they know is flawed. Conservatives appear to have voted, but when it came push time, they were not able to bring out their friends and relatives as they normally do. There was little ability to make the sell to them. So if you take about 200,000 voters like me who turn out between 15 and 30 other people each election who do not typically want to go out and vote and they chose instead to just simply vote and forget the turn out effort, you just lost between 3 and 6 million votes. That is in line with what Romney seems to have been shy of.
astonerii on December 26, 2012 at 6:06 PM
No, he isn’t. If he were, he would’ve won.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:06 PM
I know you hate Romney and wanted someone else, but c’mon really? No difference?
Would Romney pledge flexibility to Putin? No. How about “stand down” in Benghazi? Highly doubtful. Support Israel? Yes.
How about just plain not having to deal with idiots like Geithner, Rice, Kerry, Clinton or any of the other myriad of idiots that are on the Obama “team”? That’s worth voting for right there.
Yes, Romney is a RINO, but really? C’mon MAN.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 6:06 PM
what if Tagg is just makeing excuses for his dads failure? ie Tagg is talking out of his hind quarters.
as for the rest of your post I dont by it.
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:07 PM
What in Romney’s record makes you think otherwise?
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:07 PM
every candidate is flawed, so are you going to hold out until someone comes that you agree with 100%
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:09 PM
Then isn’t that left to the family and friends to wonder why they think that staying home and watching Obama win a second term better than a RINO? That only reinforces what Kataclysmic and Rational Thought said above – that emotions and feelings overcame any kind of linear, rational thought process.
Do people really need a politician to “speak” to them or give them “something” to vote for? That sounds an awful lot like liberalism and emotionalism rather than to look at what you have now and what is being offered.
I really hate having to defend Romney because it’s slim pickings, but it’s just plain irrational and lazy to think that a second term of Obama is better than Romney.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 6:11 PM
Well, yeah. All you were offering was that people have to vote AGAINST something, which is also emotionalism. And it doesn’t work.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:13 PM
You can’t have it both ways, either. You can’t sit there and say Romney was 8th best but that he should’ve won. If Obama was THAT bad, and ANY alternative was THAT stark, then there would’ve been no such thing as “8th best” or “slim pickings” in going up against him.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:15 PM
PFFT. People *should* have been voting against 16 trillion debt, 47 million on food stamps, Solyndra and others, F&F and let’s not forget that fellow Ben Ghazi that everyone seems to want to gloss over.
Rejecting overwhelming confirmed stupidity and incompetence is not emotionalism.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 6:16 PM
You think that was ALL Obama’s doing? You and other Romney fans out there were turning it into some comic book contest between Satan Barack and that whoever the GOP granted its imprimatur was by definition infinitely superior. It doesn’t work that way. If Obama was that obviously bad, would you agree that Romney shouldn’t have campaigned at all? What was the POINT of Romney’s campaigning if it wasn’t to give people a reason to vote for him?
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:19 PM
Conventional wisdom has that swing voters turn elections. Hence GOP candidates have usually pandered to them, at the risk of losing their base.
Romney won overwhelmingly the independent/moderate voters, but lost the election because he couldn’t turn out his base. Obama won because he could.
What does that tell you?
petefrt on December 26, 2012 at 6:20 PM
That his base is more comfortable with Obama than Romney
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:24 PM
No, it tells you that you win by securing your base, not by taking it for granted. As we “concern trolls” were telling the unicorn-believers for months.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:25 PM
Re: Obama – On Jan. 21, 2009, the Obama campaign team got started and never stopped. They apparently looked at their job as a marketing campaign rather than a traditional presidential campaign. It was ugly and slimy but in the end, it worked for them.
Re: Romney – On Jan. 21, 2009, I don’t know if Romney had a campaign team and when he eventually got one, they were stuck on traditional methods rather than guerilla marketing of themselves, their vision and the fact that they were Coke and Obama was Pepsi.
With regard to the whole thing, people are sick and tired of being in perpetual campaign mode.
sherry on December 26, 2012 at 6:30 PM
Good Lord. Get a grip on yourself. All you ever do is get hysterical and silly in these discussions and avoid dealing with the facts.
Obama’s record is abysmal and he is grossly incompetent. Isn’t that enough to remove someone from the position? If you ran a business and you had Obama on your staff with this performance would you keep him employed? Of course not.
You go on about campaigning. I personally think it’s a useless circus for the terminally stupid, but that’s just my opinion. You’re just creating a strawman to distract that you have nothing to debate the actual issue with.
kim roy on December 26, 2012 at 6:30 PM
Romney had been running since 2006. He stayed in the tall grass on most major issues because he’s a play-it-safe squishy moderate.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:32 PM
So Romney shouldn’t have campaigned at all. Gotcha.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:33 PM
Give it a rest. She wouldn’t have won either. As a matter of fact, it would have been an Obama blowout.
sherry on December 26, 2012 at 6:34 PM
No, it’s not a straw man. “Straw man” seems to be the last thing bad reasoners grasp for when making a lame “argument”. You say it doesn’t matter about giving people something to vote FOR. I ask what was the purpose of Romney’s campaign, and now you say that there shouldn’t have even been a campaign. OOOOOOOOKKKKKK…
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:35 PM
Palin? Name me a state that Romney won that Palin wouldn’t have won.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:36 PM
That’s the lesson I would take from it. We continue to run Dem lites, we continue to lose.
petefrt on December 26, 2012 at 6:37 PM
Well, “concern trolls” isnt the word tern I would use. You dont really get what the problem is do you. you have no political threshold in a race between Romney and Stalin you would be confortable with Stalin. Im not the Unicorn you are, ddriintn.
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:37 PM
Alaska.
sherry on December 26, 2012 at 6:37 PM
Yeah, I and others do, very well. The problem is YOU don’t.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:38 PM
Nah, she would’ve won it.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:39 PM
People out here who have a conservative mindset want CHANGE from the typical GOP “promises” to cut government – and then never doing it – ever.
They’ve been voting for the “lesser of two evils” since Ronald Reagan. All it’s ever gotten us is big spending GOP Presidents and a willing Congress.
THE BASE … IS TIRED OF THE LIES.
Why should anyone have voted for Willard? He would have simply sank this nation a bit slower than Obama – but still sunk it and given YOU the blame for it.
HondaV65 on December 26, 2012 at 6:39 PM
So are Rand,Ron, and Rubio
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:39 PM
More easily than Ryan delivered Wisconsin, I might add.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:40 PM
B-tch B-tch B-tch B-tch thats all you do why dont you fing run
ChunkyLover on December 26, 2012 at 6:41 PM
Yep, in a nutshell.
ddrintn on December 26, 2012 at 6:41 PM
Palin would have won Alaska with four words that Obama could never have uttered …
“I WILL OPEN ANWR”
HondaV65 on December 26, 2012 at 6:42 PM
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