The machine beat the manager

Mitt Romney won white voters by 20 points nationwide, but in the swing states he dramatically underperformed. He won only 46 percent of whites in New Hampshire, 51 percent in Wisconsin, 47 percent in Iowa, and 54 percent in Colorado. Karlyn Keene of the American Enterprise Institute says it looks as if blue-collar whites disproportionately stayed home. Exit polls showed that Americans with only some college education were outnumbered at the polls by those who were college graduates — something that rarely happens in national elections. The brazenness of the Obama ads was breathtaking. One spot featured Romney as a heartless vulture capitalist who was responsible for killing the wife of a steelworker during his time at Bain Capital. Not only was the story false, but Team Obama denied responsibility for the ad only days after they had put the former steelworker on a conference call with reporters to convince them to write about his tale…

Joe Trippi, who was the manager of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, says he realized on Monday afternoon that Romney had lost the election. He was reading Scott Rasmussen’s final tracking poll, which showed Obama and Romney essentially tied. But in a footnote, Rasmussen warned that only 67 percent of voters who had cast ballots already were white. He said that meant Romney would have to have an electorate on Election Day that was 77 percent white — a demographic bridge too far.