The bigger problem is that story of the four million missing voters in 2012 has been knocked down repeatedly, and convincingly. “Exit polling doesn’t really support the notion that self-identified conservatives were noticeably missing,” wrote Dan McLaughlin, an attorney and political analyst, in Red State. “The missing potential Republican voters are mostly people who have not been regular voters in the recent past, and many of them may not be politically engaged people who think of themselves as conservatives.”

Karl Rove has made an even stronger case that the stay-at-home story is a myth. The exit poll in 2012 found that 35 percent of voters were self-identified conservatives. This conservative turnout, Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “was the highest since exit polls began asking voters about their political leanings in 1976.”

Conservatives who didn’t vote “are unreliable voters who are difficult to turn out,” Rove wrote. “If the opportunity to vote against Mr. Obama after four years in office wasn’t enough to turn them out, the most likely reason is that they are not politically engaged and tend to be drawn to a candidate less on political philosophy and more because of personal characteristics.”

According to Rove’s math, since 82 percent of conservatives voted for Romney, he would have needed an additional 7.7 million votes to defeat Obama, with the conservative share of the electorate rising to 39 percent. “This has never happened,” Rove wrote.