Well, I'm too cheap to buy Photoshop and Microsoft Paint sucks, so I'm just not going to post the goofy photo I was trying to make. But, it woulda been so awesome!
Anyway, Obama wins with 51% (~62 million) of the popular vote to Romney's 48% (~59 million), and that managed to translate into 332 to 206 Electoral Votes. So many different things to consider and discuss that I don't know how to arrange things, so the post may be a little jumbled.
First some interesting data: the overall popular vote was down from 2008, even though there are more registered voters now. Obama got 10 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, Romney got 3 million fewer votes than the pathetic 2008 Republican nominee McCain did. McCain's vote total would have beaten Obama this year. More data:
Ethnicity/Gender Ratio:
White Men - Romney 64% Obama 35%
White Women - Romney 57% Obama 42%
Hispanic Men - Obama 65% Romney 34%
Hispanic Women - Obama 76% Romney 23%
Black Men - Obama 87% Romney 12%
Black Women - Obama 96% Romney 3%
Asian Total - Obama 73% Romney 26%
Generational Ratios:
Marital Ratio:
Married Men - no data
Married Women - Romney 53% Obama 46%
Unmarried Men - Obama 56% Romney 43%
Unmarried Women - Obama 67% Romney 32%
Dem-Rep-Ind Split:
Democrat Ratio: 92% Obama 7% Romney
Republican Ratio:
Independent Ratio: 50% Romney 45% Obama
If anyone knows of a good website that can fill in the missing information above, let me know and I'll update the article. I thought I would be able to find the age breakdowns, but haven't.
I figured Romney would win a relatively close election. I figured the partisan split would be something like halfway between the electorate of 2008 and that of 2010. Obamamania could not still exist. The partisan split of 2008 was DEM +7, that of 2010 was I think REP +1, but it might have been DEM +1. Regardless, I expected DEM +3. With Independents breaking for Romney, I figured this would give Romney the popular vote closely, though the Electoral Vote was going to be tough. I figured enough swing states would fall Romney's way to give him the victory.
In the campaign, Obama campaigned towards his base and Romney, after the Primaries, campaigned towards the middle. This indicated to me that Romney had the advantage, that Obama was desperate to have to campaign hard for the base. However, the polls show that that campaign paid off for him.
As The Huffington Post says:
As the exit polls showed, Obama won the popular vote despite losing to Romney handily among independents. Independents preferred Romney to Obama 50 to 45 percent. This was only the second time in the last 10 elections that the winner lost the independent vote, and in the only other time it occurred the margin was much closer, as Bush lost independents to Kerry by just 2 points, 51 to 49 percent.
The reason Obama was able to overcome this deficit was that many more Democrats than Republicans turned out to vote. The Democrats held a 6-point advantage over Republicans among voters in 2012, down only a single point from 2008. Since Democrats supported their nominee by a whopping 92-7 margin, Obama was able to overcome losing independents, even by a significant margin.
Even though we saw no Obamania like we saw in 2008, the Democrats turned out in force while Republicans tended to sit on their hands, even though anyone paying attention knew how important this election was.
Pollsters and other analysts focused on a gender gap, that Obama had a large advantage with women that Romney wasn't going to be able to overcome, however, the results don't quite bear that out.
As The Atlantic says regarding the gender gap:
In other words, if you want to place a bet on how someone will vote and you have to choose between knowing that person's gender or their race/ethnicity, you're better off learning their race or ethnicity. That marker is more telling.
The one critical statistic above is the race of the voter. If I had the age statistics, that may be another critical factor, but, as with gender, it probably is not as telling as race. The marital status probably ties more into the fact that Whites have a far higher marriage ratio than other ethnic groups (Asians probably are high too but still too small a percentage of the population to affect the marriage ratio).
I'm not going to take the time to produce the poll results, but on questions of who would best take care of the problems important to voters, Romney was leading on almost every catagory, including the (by far) most important question of the Economy. But, rather than vote for the person they thought would take care of the problems, minorities voted strongly for the candidate who was Not White. Though Whites voted strongly for Romney, they weren't as unified a voting bloc as the minority groups were. Even Asians, who get screwed worse even than Whites on Affirmative Action policies and would also suffer even worse on Obama's redistributionist policies voted overwhelmingly for the Affirmative Action president.
A President who took a recession and made it worse and longer with his Socialist policies, who advanced policies that weakened America and its allies around the world (his Administration's feckless handling of Benghazi is a chief example), and who did everything he could to exacerbate racial tensions in America was re-elected.
It could be argued, probably rightly, that Blacks and Latinos would consider the redistributionist policies of the president to be in their best interest, but this wouldn't hold for Asians who have a higher standard of living than Whites.
But, it is not just the extreme racial vote that did Romney in; as stated above, the vote total for Romney is down from that of McCain. How can that be, when the energy for Romney seemed to be way higher than it was during the perfect Democrat storm of 2008? That is the thing that I really do not understand: the Republican or White or whatever voters that sat on their hands this election. I don't know how someone could have been motivated to vote for McCain in 2008 and not be motivated to vote for Romney in 2012.
An evenly-matched electorate, in which Independents favored Romney, should have given the election to Romney. Instead Conservatives stayed home. Why?
Why did we re-elect this complete failure of a President?
Because what the majority of Americans want now is free stuff from the Government, and we have a government eager to hand it to them. This to me seems to signal the end of a functioning Democracy.
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| Time to build a bunker |
It's not that the government wasn't already eager to give free stuff to Americans, it's that, faced with the fiscal cliff that we are, and having a choice with Romney/Ryan that at least offered some hope of facing it realistically, Americans chose to keep getting more free stuff and screw everything else.
