Posted on 11/10/2012 5:13:59 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The key to understanding the 2012 election is simple: A huge slice of the electorate stayed home.
The punditocracy — which is more of the ruling class than an eye on the ruling class — has naturally decided that this is because Republicans are not enough like Democrats: They need to play more identity politics (in particular, adopt the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration) in order to be viable. But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. They are Washington. With no hope that a Romney administration or more Republicans in Congress would change this sad state of affairs, these voters shrugged their shoulders and became non-voters.
“This is the most important election of our lifetime.” That was the ubiquitous rally cry of Republican leaders. The country yawned. About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 — 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry.
That is staggering. And, as if to ensure that conservatives continue making the same mistakes that have given us four more years of ruinous debt, economic stagnation, unsustainable dependency, Islamist empowerment, and a crippling transfer of sovereignty to global tribunals, Tuesday’s post-mortems fixate on the unremarkable fact that reliable Democratic constituencies broke overwhelmingly for Democrats. Again, to focus on the vote is to miss the far more consequential non-vote. The millions who stayed home relative to the 2008 vote equal the population of Ohio — the decisive state. If just a sliver of them had come out for Romney, do you suppose the media would be fretting about the Democrats’ growing disconnect with white people?
Obama lost an incredible 9 million voters from his 2008 haul. If told on Monday that fully 13 percent of the president’s support would vanish, the GOP establishment would have stocked up on champagne and confetti.
To be sure, some of the Obama slide is attributable to “super-storm” Sandy. Its chaotic aftermath reduced turnout in a couple of big blue states: New York, where about 6 million people voted, and New Jersey, where 3.5 million did. That is down from 2008 by 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Yet, given that these solidly Obama states were not in play, and that — thanks to Chris Christie’s exuberance — our hyper-partisan president was made to look like a bipartisan healer, Sandy has to be considered a big net plus on Obama’s ledger.
There also appears to have been some slippage in the youth vote, down 3 percent from 2008 levels — 49 percent participation, down from 52 percent. But even with this dip, the under-30 crowd was a boon for the president. Thanks to the steep drop in overall voter participation, the youth vote actually increased as a percentage of the electorate — 19 percent, up from 18 percent. Indeed, if there is any silver lining for conservatives here, it’s that Obama was hurt more by the decrease in his level of support from this demographic — down six points from the 66 percent he claimed in 2008 — than by the marginal drop in total youth participation. It seems to be dawning on at least some young adults that Obamaville is a bleak place to build a future.
Put aside the fact that, as the election played out, Sandy was a critical boost for the president. Let’s pretend that it was just a vote drain — one that explains at least some of the slight drop in young voters. What did it really cost Obama? Maybe a million votes? It doesn’t come close to accounting for the cratering of his support. Even if he had lost only 8 million votes, that would still have been 11 percent of his 2008 vote haul gone poof. Romney should have won going away.
Yet, he did not. Somehow, Romney managed to pull nearly 2 million fewer votes than John McCain, one of the weakest Republican nominees ever, and one who ran in a cycle when the party had sunk to historic depths of unpopularity. How to explain that?
The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.
As the 2012 campaign elucidated, the GOP wants to be seen as the party of preserving the unsustainable welfare state. When it comes to defense spending, they are just as irresponsible as Democrats in eschewing adult choices. Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? In fact, when did the GOP last explain how a country that is in a $16 trillion debt hole could afford to enlarge anything besides its loan payments?
Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off — and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming.
As ZeroHedge points out, we now pay out $250 billion more on mandatory obligations (i.e., just entitlements and interest on the debt) than we collect in taxes. Understand, that’s an annual deficit of a quarter trillion dollars before one thin dime is spent on the exorbitant $1.3 trillion discretionary budget — a little over half of which is defense spending, and the rest the limitless array of tasks that Republicans, like Democrats, have decided the states and the people cannot handle without Washington overlords.
What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party’s nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on — cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium. In the void, the party establishment proceeds to delegate its response to John McCain and Lindsey Graham: the self-styled foreign-policy gurus who urged Obama to entangle us with Benghazi’s jihadists in the first place, and who are now pushing for a repeat performance in Syria — a new adventure in Islamist empowerment at a time when most Americans have decided Iraq was a catastrophe and Afghanistan is a death trap where our straitjacketed troops are regularly shot by the ingrates they’ve been sent to help.
Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it — or, if they do, they lack confidence that they can explain its benefits compellingly. They’ve bought the Democrats’ core conceit that the modern world is just too complicated for ordinary people to make their way without bureaucratic instruction. They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.”
The calculation is straightforward: Republicans lack the courage to argue from conviction that health care would work better without federal mandates and control — that safety nets are best designed by the states, the people, and local conditions, not Washington diktat. In their paralysis, we are left with a system that will soon implode, a system that will not provide care for the people being coerced to pay in. Most everybody knows this is so, yet Republicans find themselves too cowed or too content to advocate dramatic change when only dramatic change will save us. They look at education, the mortgage crisis, and a thousand other things the same way — intimidated by the press, unable to articulate the case that Washington makes things worse.
Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. (See Jonah Goldberg’s jaw-dropping tally from early 2004 — long before we knew their final debt tab would come to nearly $5 trillion.) No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.
That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. It’s certainly not an alternative. For Americans who think elections can make a real difference, Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.
Those 9 million Americans need a new choice. We all do.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.
“the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration.”
Sure it does, but so does the “business community” and the Wall Street Journal. It’s all good, they say. Those people wading across the Rio are nuclear physicists as well as grass cutters, all contributing to our booming economy.
And it’s bi-partisan. The Elder Bush invented NAFTA, and it was Bubba who pushed it through Congress.
This aspect of the ‘blame game’ is total BS...it is the fault of this group; it is the fault of that group.
Here is who is at fault...the GOP nominates a candidate who was being rejected by 65-70% of Republican voters all the way thru the primary process. They leave their primaries ‘open’ to Democrat shenanigans. Then they are SHOCKED when a good portion of the 65%’ers don’t show up on Election Day. That ‘where else are they going to go?’ mandate didn’t sell. They stayed home. Blacks obey their plantation owners on Election Day...enough of the 65%’ers threw off their chains to keep Romney from winning. It’s as simple as that.
Maybe because the Cuban vote is no longer what you think it is.
We live in a very Cuban part of Miami (Little Havana). We can see the generation shifts pretty easily. The Cubans who came here after Castro took power are very conservative, but very old, and dying out. (Some may finally be hoping they can go home and visit the country in which they were born as well.) I suspect the support for Rubio has to do with the fact that he is Cuban more than any important politics.
They are also very oriented to the “old country” and language. (My neighbor across the street learned English because he had to for work, but his wife still does not speak English and does not drive a car (that is the husband’s job).)
Their children are quite different. They are quite a bit more liberal (remember, they have grown up in our public school system, not Cuba’s), including their Catholic religion (several are divorced, and I am pretty sure one has had an abortion).
They also put a pretty high value on education, and they have a lot of kids of their own. A number of my neighbors’ kids have become teachers. Our neighborhood still had about 10x more Romney signs than Obama signs (which of course raises the other issue of vote fraud, given the fiasco we had here), but I was surprised at the number of Obama signs I saw. Guess which houses had them? The houses where I knew at least one of their children was a teacher, or other public school employee.
Which brings us right back to the issue of voter turnout (or lack thereof).
My impression is that the Cubans who had the Obama signs out on their lawns were much more motivated to actually go and vote than were the Romney supporters who only sensed a vague connection with the candidate.
Bottom line, Mitt may have beaten McCain and tied Bush 43 which raises other questions, doesn't it ?
“This is a basic, basic lesson. You do not vilify the most passionate, and dedicated supporters in order to fish for wishy washy moderates.
You will lose every time.”
The numbers don’t support your assertion.
Without a coalition of conservatives and moderates, you will lose every time.
There are not enough true conservatives to win national elections.
Because of the changing demographics of the electorate, if conservatives don’t accept a candidate that falls short of their ideal, the democrats will outnumber republican votes by ever-widening margins.
The GOP-e won’t let this happen. Conservatives will be left behind and the party will be forced to look for a broader coalition that includes moderate independents and moderate Latinos, and conservatives will lose their remaining seats at the table.
I don’t particularly like this, but I think that’s what will happen.
There is another one coming up in 2014 and 2016. I will remember what you are saying now.
Do YOU understand that?
/johnny
All good points. Where I disagree is with Rubio getting the Palin treatment. Florida is not Wasilla. Rubio does not take any votes away from Romney. Ryan was a safe pick. Safe doesn’t win elections.
I don’t think Alinsky could have made it any more clear. The lefts biggest fear is ridicule. That’s all we had to go with. Nothing else would have worked.
McCarthy is 100% correct about this. What's pathetic is that those "many people" are being vindicated every time the bloated Federal big gets even more massive under REPUBLICAN oversight.
Romney had more than enough votes to win. The difference was in the outright fraud perpetrated by the 'Rats.
Perhaps it was a combination of the two. But our system of electing candidates is broken. It is corrupted and needs to be fixed. The fix is simple. Voter photo ID and no early voting. Period.
“Those who oppose him will just be frauded out”.
Agree. The sanctity of the vote has been permanently destroyed by democrat corruption.
Enjoy the next 4 years. You’ve earned them.
I agree with you. I still believe this election was stolen. It would be nice to not have to blame boneheads for handing Ocrap the election.
The votes are not all counted yet. So maybe we all should wait for that.
If you watched that video earlier from some years back, that guy was saying you can program a 50%/48% election right into a machine and the poll inspectors would never see it.
Tells me all need to know. In that case, turnout does not matter.
Be prepared to hear all about lots of “voters staying home”...the Bipartisan Oligarchy would rather we all stew in that mess..than having us all bothered, and deciding to investigate, about all the voters voting who never voted...
Listening to descriptions of how “Democrats got out their ground game” with “superior ability to bring those to the polls who normally would never go” by the commentators on Fox election night..made me realize..what they actually have done is track names that HAVE NOT VOTED IN MANY, MANY elections cycles....and vote them.
A well-funded project, county-by-county..to examine the names signed in at at the polls..and going out to find those individuals..you’ll find they were never physically at he polls..or they themselves never filled out the absentee ballot....or their names in the death registers.
The very LAST thing the Bipartisan Oligarchy want or need is any semblance of Constitutional Federal Gov’mt or a clean vote.
Both those are up to We the People to cram it down their throats so hard in DC they will, someday, never do otherwise.
Not difficult to understand at all.
A minority of people are immature purists who can't put up a good candidate of their own so pout and throw tantrums.
Very transparent easy to see. There will always be the immature among us.
There’s a good chance that folks who stayed home went a “bridge too far” this time.
From here on out it’s a miracle if national elections are any different than a local Chicago election in which case they can all work their hearts out for a candidate and even each one vote twice but it won’t make a difference.
The fact is they’re playing Russian Roulette with their future and the future of the children but have convinced themselves they're standing on the moral high ground.
JMHO
You continue to prove my point. These are not “my” candidates by any means.
This is not about someone kissing your ass and wooing you to do the right thing. If you are not man enough and smart enough to do that, then you are just as much a part of the problem as the obama stash obama phone woman.
Your perverted shallow analysis that this is a sales game and somehow I benefit from your vote - is just pathetic and infantile. The country will be devastated by another four years of Obama and every single person who did not try to stop that is partially culpable.
If you sat around waiting for the “right” candidate to strike your fancy or for the right person to kiss your sorry ass in the right place, then you are an abomination.
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