This has nothing to do with his political positions and everything to do with how he deployed his resources. Political races don't just involve posturing over the issues of the day - it's running a massive project with a fixed deadline in November. Fundraising. What issues to emphasize. What media outlets to focus on. Reagan won not because he was conservative. He won because he knew how to work the levers. How to manipulate the media into giving him free coverage over issues that made him look good. Who to talk to. What to talk about. What not to talk about. When to talk about it. How to talk about it. The media used to hammer him for being evasive whenever he gave a stock or evasive answer to questions he perceived as paved with land mines. But that's the difference between a political genius like Reagan and someone like Cuccinelli - Reagan is like a chess grandmaster who can see ten moves ahead, whereas Cuccinelli is playing checkers.
It had more to do with all the Government employees that felt like they had been screwed by the shut down, when in fact they got an extended free paid vacation.
How do you reach that voter? You could I suppose offer more free stuff. Unmarried female voters went big for Big Mac, so did Hispanics all of which vote on the basis of more free stuff.
The Libertarian may not have pulled more votes from Ken, but he did run some negative adds which didn't hurt Mac.
The fact is facts don't matter one whit, if you think they do just find me a few quotes from Obama supporters that think they were lied to, they always find a way to blame someone else.
One thing is very clear to me, we lost the last election because our population has became very socialistic, or there was massive vote fraud, neither of those problems can be overcome with good campaigns.
Thomas Sowell had a column a while back where he posited the likelihood of us staving off the march to socialism. He came to the conclusion there was only one way to stop it and that was revolution which he said was not likely. I agree with him.