The Auto Bailout Didn’t Decide Ohio ("historic black turnout " did)

While many believed that the auto bailout and attacks on Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat would allow the president to win the state with the support of white working class voters, the exit polls show that Obama did worse among Ohio’s white voters than John Kerry. This was not true, however, in the other Midwestern battleground states like Wisconsin and Iowa. Moreover, if there was anywhere that the president should have excelled due to the auto bailout, it would have been northeast Ohio. But the president lost northeastern Ohio’s two classic white middle class bellwethers: Lake County, home to the overwhelmingly white suburbs and exurbs east of Cleveland, and Stark County, home to Canton. The president also lost additional ground in traditionally Democratic stretches of eastern Ohio, where Obama performed worse than any Democrat since McGovern in a stretch of “coal country” along the Ohio River. And Obama’s problems weren’t limited to eastern Ohio. The president performed poorly in southwestern Ohio, including one deeply conservative and culturally southern county where Obama’s performance was the worst by a Democrat since at least 1868.

Instead, historic black turnout carried Obama to victory in the Buckeye State. As mentioned prior to the election, much of Obama’s improvement over Kerry was attributable to gains among black voters. In 2004, African Americans represented 11 percent of the Ohio electorate and voted 84 percent for Kerry. In 2012, 15 percent of Ohio’s electorate was African American and voted 96 percent for the president. These figures probably overstate the increase in black turnout, but there’s not much question that black voters are the main reason why Obama did better than Kerry. In 2004, Kerry won the four counties corresponding to Ohio’s largest black population centers—Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, and Cincinnati—by 16 points while losing the rest of the state by 11. In 2012, Obama won the four large, urban counties by 25 points while losing the rest of the state by 9.1 points.

IMO, no political party should be able to help anyone vote.

People should decide to register or not. They should decide if they are going to vote or not. They should drive, take a bus or a taxi to the polls, and vote if they want to.

All of this, should be done by the voter, and none of it should take place because a party intervened.

If the parties want to send out postcards, or make phone calls, I’m all for it. On the day of the election, no phone calls should be allowed.

historic black turnout = massive ballot box stuffing plus massive white voter destruction.

Since we measure “black voter turnout” as a percentage and not an absolute number, loss of white votes in one of only two states in the region that showed a lower Romney vs McCain total (OH and PA), creates a sense of a higher turnout of all other minorities.

Someone kept posting the left’s strategy of keeping track of non-voters and “polling” them to see if they plan on voting. If it’s obvious they’re not going to vote you vote for them. Sounded like a lot of work until I noticed that every OH county lets you generate a list of voters and their last voting date on line. You can break it down by precinct, sort it any way you want and generate a PDF, mailing labels, a file meant to be fed right into a database program or even a “walking list” by location. They sure make it easy, takes all of 2 minutes.

IMO, no political party should be able to help anyone vote.

— I absolutely agree. I also think it should be illegal to keep track of who shows up. If I want to stay home I should have the right to do it without anyone knowing about it.

If I were a union employee and didn’t show up I could suddenly lose my job. If we take away the party’s ability to keep track of who’s voting we make their job of voter fraud a lot more difficult.

"Voter fraud, no question about it."

What there is no question about is the assumption that there is any way, given the protocols deployed in our voting system to verify any votes. There is no audit trail, and that is almost certainly by design. There once was in the US, and still is in Israel, where US citizen Jews, most of them quite liberal, and many with homes in the US, voted 89% for Romney, as reported by Israel's Washington Post, Haaretz. It is not believable that 69% of that class voted for Obama in the US. Jews in the US are more religious than those living in Israel. We have clever activists inventing all sorts of plausible, but untrue, reasons that the election didn't turn out as many, given the debates and enthusiasm of voters, thought it would. Their objective is probably also to promote class warfare, if they can. 100% of voters in Pennsylvania voting for Obama is a joke, but the community activists know what they are doing. They benefit from division.

The only way elections can be monitored is if the votes, the media, preferably paper, are counted at the precinct before they are removed from the sight of those managing the precinct. That is critical. It is the only mechanism that provides and audit trail. The local workers count ballots, in front of each other, and their signatures go on the boxes of ballots which are shipped to secure storage. The precinct count is the final count, unless court order is granted. Then, and only then, is a recount meaningful.

Recounts might reveal ridiculous anomalies, but they don't contain relevant voting information. Without paper ballots, and nothing in a computer is trustworthy, there is no meaningful recount because numbers in a file have no history one can trace. All this discussion about exit polls and voter intent is nonsense without verifiable voting, and we in the US have an unverifiable and opaque mess for a voting system Our absentee ballots are counted, in most states, by SEIU employees. It doesn't matter, because the votes must be assumed to have been so corrupted that the absentee counts are just a formality. Of course if a a few thousand votes here or there are needed for the pro-union candidate, it is trivial to lose a few thousand ballots from a conservative district, as happened in Florida, or see that postal workers were a day late with the overseas military ballots.

We didn't have an election; we had an exercise to tell us who would be running our economy and our military for the next four years, and probably, by then, for much longer than that.

We had a pocketful of political capital in Ohio coming out of the 2010 midterm elections. Governor Kasich spent it on SB5-union busting- and so we lost hundreds of thousands of blue collar white voters. The writing was on the wall in 2011 when SB5 was crushed by a referednum vote with massive turnout and support across Ohio. Th sentiments that drove that referendum vote were definitely in play in the 2012 election and I suspect they will still be in play in 2014 when Kasich is up for reelection. Of course blacks voted exclusively for Obama too and that didn’t help. it didn’t help that women and hispanics flocked to him either.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.