Free Republic

In an article referenced by Scott earlier today, Byron York shows that Mitt Romney did not lose the election because of his failure to win the Hispanic vote. Romnwy would have lost in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire even if he had gained a large portion of the Hispanic votes in these key battleground states.York also demonstrates that, as we have argued, Hispanics are not a natural Republican constituency. If anything, they are natural Democrats for reasons unrelated to the immigration issue. Exit poll information suggests that Hispanics based their votes on a number of issues beyond...

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard Jay Cost undertakes a retrospective on what happened in the election just passed. Cost detects a mystery. It’s the case of the missing voters: ******** In 2008, some 131.5 million Americans went to the polls; while the votes are still being tallied, this time around there probably were between 127 and 130 million votes cast. Most of the decline came from white voters; in fact, between 6 and 9 million white voters went missing this year, relative to 2008. It is a reasonable guess that the number of white votes in 2004...

Speaking at The David Horowitz Freedom Center's "Restoration Weekend" in Florida on November 16, Pat Caddell indicted what he called the Republican "consultant-lobbyist-establishment" complex for losing a presidential campaign in 2012 President Barack Obama had no business winning. “No presidential campaign should be run by consultants,” Caddell said. “They should be run by people who are committed to the candidate and not into making big money.” Caddell said “Republicans never attempted to put a frame around the national election” because “the people who run the messaging in the Republican party and their consultants refused to do it.” Caddell, the former...

I am incredibly steamed this Thanksgiving Holiday over what the Democrats are doing to my country. Everybody by now knows—or should know—how readily Democrats conduct election fraud, and how determined they are to defend it. James O’Keefe and others have taken videos of paid Democratic operatives encouraging citizens to vote twice. O’Keefe was even able to claim Attorney General Eric Holder’s own ballot at a district polling place by claiming to be him, and then to vote in his place. … But even knowing this, I was not prepared for a conversation I had at Thanksgiving dinner with my brother-in-law,...

This will boggle your mind. Barack Obama lost independent voters to Mitt Romney in every swing state except North Carolina and still won reelection. President Barack Obama won a second term by taking the majority of swing states. But a closer look at exit polling data shows Obama lost the independent vote in most of those states over the last four years. Independents, who do not align with one political party or another, make up a fast-growing and coveted voting bloc.

The Catholic Church — a politically and ethnically sprawling institution — has no natural home on the American ideological spectrum. Neither major party combines moral conservatism with a passion for social justice. So Catholic leaders have often challenged Democrats to be more pro-life and Republicans to be more concerned about immigrants and the poor. But President Obama’s first term was a period of unexpected aggression against the rights of religious institutions. His Justice Department, in the Hosanna-Tabor case, argued against the existence of any “ministerial exception” to employment rules. Obama tried to mandate that Catholic schools, hospitals and charities offer...

Disbelief is the word that defines the Republican state of mind in the wake of the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama. The obvious questions are: “How can Americans have re-elected a president who has presided over an economy where unemployment still hovers at 8 percent ?” And, “How can Americans have re-elected a president who still doesn’t grasp that his big government policies are what have blocked our economic recovery?” The Republican Party needs to take responsibility for this disaster. Nothing in the outcome of this election is a surprise. The realities which produced these election results have been...

When President Obama took the stage at McCormick Place in Chicago well after midnight, we were all too wiped out with joy or depression or Nate Silver auto-refresh fatigue to pay careful attention to the speech the newly reelected president delivered. The phrase that lingered in most of our sleepy ears was the reprise of his career-launching invocation of the United States as being more than red and blue states. So soaring, so unifying. But those words were merely the trappings of magnanimity draped over an argument that was, at its core, harsher than the one he had regularly delivered...

<p>A score of people this past week have asked me about the three million Republicans allegedly "missing" at the polls this year. For starters, if the Washington Post is to be believed, Mitt Romney received 1.3 million fewer votes than John McCain did in 2008, not 3 million. For the record, Obama received 7.5 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008.</p>

The University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Sentiment rose to its highest point since the beginning of Q4 2007. But bear in mind that Q4 2007 is where the housing market fell off a cliff. So, I wouldn’t place too much confidence in this index. After all, US recession probability (blue line) is up. Still, declining mortgage rates, declining gas prices, 171,000 jobs created and a stabilizing housing market led to rising consumer confidence. And the government’s food stamp program (SNAP) rose to 47,102,780 persons as of the end of August, an all-time high! And the increase from July to...

As the smoke clears from the wreckage of the Romney defeat on Tuesday, some intriguing yet disturbing facts are coming to light. * Fewer people overall voted in 2012 (about 117 million) compared to 2008 (about 125 million).* President Obama received some 6.6 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008 (60,217,329 in 2012 votes compared to 66,882,230 votes in 2008). * One would think that such a dynamic would have helped Romney win — clearly it did not. * Incredibly, Governor Romney received nearly 1 million fewer votes in 2012 than Sen. John McCain received in 2008....

Mitt Romney wasn't a bad candidate. He ran a fairly strong race. He made a few errors. And he made many good moves. Certainly he was adequate. And he was probably the strongest Republican candidate among the primary field of contenders. That is, he was the best man available to run against Barack Obama. And he did a pretty good job. Obama on the other hand, was a horrible candidate. He was mean and vindictive. He was contemptuous and superficial. He ran on irrelevancies like abortion and a fictitious Republican war against women. He didn't give his supporters any reason...

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...

While evangelical leaders have long protested that evangelicalism is politically diverse and is a theological identifier rather than a political one, it appears that evangelicals are more politically unified than ever before... We know less about evangelical voters this year than we did four years ago because exit polls did not ask as many voters about being a "born again or evangelical" Christian. According to pre-election polls, white evangelicals backed Romney by nearly a four-to-one margin. Romney received a larger slice of the evangelical vote than any previous Republican presidential candidate. At nearly 80 percent, evangelical support for Romney was...

The debates, the conventions, the storm coverage, Benghazi, the state of the economy, jobs data and all other events that affected all fifty states mattered. But the paid media, the in-person campaigning in swing states, and the massive ground game deployed by both sides accomplished nothing. Obama lost all the votes he was going to lose anyway in the swing states and Romney gained of the votes he was going to gain anyway in the swing states.

If you're discouraged or think the world is upside down, I have something for you. Guess what, regardless of who won the election, today we still have millions of babies being aborted every year. We still have 50% of marriages ending in divorce. We still have a supposedly Christian culture that has separated sex from marriage from procreation. We still have many Americans who are more likely to vote based upon peer pressure, or how nice somebody is, or their own self-interest, or by what the media told them, or by what's socially easy than they are to vote based...

Here’s an interesting plot twister; Republicans made the assumption, incorrectly as it turns out, that voters in states with high-unemployment would kick the bums out. That is, that they’d vote Obama out of office and try to find someone who could solve the jobs problem in this country. Turns out, the opposite has happened. Voters in high-unemployment states actually like the president, and the reason is obvious; the Federal Government is paying the jobless, extending unemployment benefits, food stamps, and even underwriting disability payments from Social Security. Think we’re different from the Europeans? Think again. The proportion of Greek men...

In a little-noticed footnote to last week’s election, state legislature elections this year have produced the highest number of states with one-party rule in 60 years. Democrats or Republicans now have sole control of the governorship and both legislative chambers in 37 state capitals around the country. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks party representation in the country’s 50 state governments, Democrats now control all three bases of power – the governorship and both houses of the state legislature – in 14 states and Republicans in 23, with only 12 states sharing power. (Nebraska’s unicameral...

In too many posts to count, I’ve argued that the reason Romney was the overwhelming choice of the Washington campaign consultant class since the day after McCain lost in 2008 was that he was their dream candidate. He possessed the two qualities most prized by this insular population of political parasites who occupy the D.C. beltway: An enormous amount of money and an equally enormous dearth of core convictions. For this reason, they correctly recognized Romney as someone who could easily be fleeced for a virtually limitless amount of money. He’d shower them with tens of millions of dollars in return for their sage “advice” on...

Fox News and other media outlets have projected that President Obama has been reelected to a second term. If, in celebrating his victory Obama wanted to give credit where credit is due, he might want to think about calling some of America's top journalists, since their favorable approach almost certainly made the difference between victory and defeat. Reviewing the 2012 presidential campaign, here are five ways the media elite tipped the public relations scales in favor of the liberal Obama and against the conservative challenger Mitt Romney: