Free Republic

Ok, I was wrong. I thought the Republicans would win the Presidency. I was not the only one. Smart people like Michael Barone and Karl Rove thought so also, in addition to people like Dick Morris. A knowledgeable friend called me the Saturday before the election and told me John McLaughlin, the pollster, just told him Romney wins it going away. So what happened? First there is the big picture. I think there were three issues that hurt the Romney campaign along the way. The first is his turn to the right to win the primaries. My now politically-astute son...

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...

The election post-mortem has identified all manner of causes for the Republicans’ defeat, from the “woman problem” and the “Hispanic problem,” as Peggy Noonan put it, to Romney’s fatcat persona and his inept campaign. But there’s a simpler reason, one consistent with the critics of democracy starting in ancient Athens––Obama and the Democrats promised voters more free stuff. The differences between the political mechanisms of ancient Athens and those of America today do not erase the similarities of mentality and sensibility popular rule creates in its citizens. Most important is the way democracy leads to radical egalitarianism: the belief, as...

Let’s face facts. Democrats gained in the House of Representatives, the Senate and the chief Democrat in charge was re-elected after one of the worst four year periods in American history, economically and constitutionally. How does that happen? Republicans/Conservatives gave voters credit for being smart while Democrats assumed they’re not. Let’s break down what Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the Obama SuperPACs, et al were saying for a year and a half: Republicans are prosecuting a war on women Romney only cares about his rich friends and Wall Street Romney is responsible for the death of a woman by somehow giving her...

MessageToEagle.com - Normally, as a matter of personal preference I don’t get into politics, but when we have a presidential campaign that begins to cross over into the strange twilight zone of religious weirdness that centers on the one person who’s going to control the most powerful government and army on the face of the earth, well, it brings up some unusual scenarios to wonder about. It is being reported in the media today that former presidential candidate Mitt Romney only wrote a victory speech for Election Day; presumably a harried, last minute scramble to revise his speech was being...

Simply based on CNN raw totals counted so far (no projection for votes not counted) Romney has 18,573,603 votes from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tenessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. McCain had 18,402,511 in those states. By the way, in 2004 Bush had 17,746,072 votes in those states. Obviously there is no official definition of "Bible Belt" and PARTS of many other states would fit (Virginia, Colorado Springs, southern Indiana, etc.), and PARTS of the states I included as "Bible Belt" are definitely not full of Evangelicals. Obviously the voting age population has grown over...

Catholics are a quarter of the electorate, and they voted for Obama over Romney by the same margin as the total electorate, 50%-48%. Contrary to what many pundits are saying, this suggests that the bishops’ campaign for religious liberty, waged against the Health and Human Services mandate, actually paid off: Obama got 54% of the Catholic vote in 2008 to McCain’s 45%. Some commentators talk about the Catholic vote as if it were monolithic, and others say it doesn’t exist. It would be more accurate to say there are four Catholic votes: practicing and non-practicing; white and Latino. Among practicing...

Congratulations Mr. President on your most recent win in your bid for reelection – “Well Done.” You have earned the right to be THE man responsible for America’s decline – Congratulations. Your high water line is 23 million Americans unemployed, 8% unemployment for 42 consecutive months, 47 million Americans on food stamps, 6 trillion dollars in NEW debt, a declining military (with a looming 1 trillion dollar budget cut, laying off or firing many that voted for you), Iran on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb, threatening Israel’s peace and security, interest rates set to skyrocket (currently at 3.4%...

Perhaps I should have changed the title of this post to "The Americans Who Stayed At Home". That's really where this all lies. In the aftermath of the election, I was reading some posts on Facebook and came across one from someone I am related to. He and his wife shall remain nameless, but what they posted troubled me greatly. They basically congratulated President Obama for his victory and then wrote that they were proud of the fact that they did not vote. I could not believe what I was reading. How can any American citizen not have the desire...

The states examined are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Michigan. The trend for Obama was across the board: fewer votes in all swing states. However, the Republicans were able to increase the votes for Romney in seven of the nine states.

Romney Adviser: It Was the Messaging By Robert Costa | November 7, 2012 Boston — A Romney adviser partly blames last night’s defeat on a weak message. “Turnout was the big problem, since we didn’t get all of McCain’s voters to the polls, but we really should have been talking more about Benghazi and Obamacare,” an adviser says, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Those are major issues and Romney rarely mentioned them in the final days.” The adviser expects Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, to bear the brunt of the blame, but not all of it. “There is a...

One of the more intriguing narratives for election 2012 was proposed by political scientist Brendan Nyhan fairly early on: that it was "Bizarro 2004." ~ SNIP ~ The Election Day returns actually continued the similarities. George W. Bush won by 2.4 percent of the popular vote, which is probably about what Obama’s victory margin will be once all the ballots are counted. ~ SNIP ~ But most importantly, the 2012 elections actually weren’t about a demographic explosion with non-white voters. Instead, they were about a large group of white voters not showing up. ~ SNIP ~ In other words, if...

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is calling for the creation of a third political party — saying it is clear to him that neither major political party is willing to address the nation’s economic problems. “We need a third party to save this country,” Cain told American Family Radio host Bryan Fischer. “This country is in trouble and it is clear that neither party — is going to fix the problems we face.” Cain agreed with Fischer’s assessment that conservatives are growing tired of being ignored by Republican party leadership — and that many believe the GOP no longer...

Newsmax Why Mitt Romney Lost Wednesday, November 7, 2012 02:24 PM By: Christopher Ruddy Newsmax Christopher Ruddy’s Perspective: It was the worst of times and the worst of times. With the 2012 election results in, there are no short- or even medium-term "silver linings" for Republicans. President Barack Obama has won a decisive victory and the GOP, expecting to gain Senate seats, actually had a net loss of three. The "morning after" will bring the expected explanations and after-game quarterbacking. Still, it is important that the GOP understand why we lost this one in hopes of future victory. Perhaps the...

Wait until next year -- 2016, that is. That’s what disappointed Republican spinners kept saying Tuesday night as they watched Mitt Romney’s hopes crash and burn in swing state after swing state. How many times did I hear a Republican talk about how their party’s deep bench of future all-stars will return it to power in Washington in four years? But all the Ryans, Rubios, Bushes, Haleys and Christies in America can’t put the GOP -- or the country -- back together again. The GOP is a wreck -- and not just in California, where the party’s registration is now...

Memorandum to the GOP: When running an election campaign it is often valuable to select a nominee who represents the rank and file of the Party. This is how other Parties do it. Perhaps you might get on board. Who? Well let’s start with who not to select. There was George H.W. Bush, who, while a nice, honorable public servant, won primarily because of the record Reagan established. He lost because the rest of us thought that when he mouthed the words “Read my lips, go to Texas,” he meant “Read my lips, no new taxes.” There was Bob Dole,...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- Mitt Romney's surrogate-turned-President Obama fan -- bristled today at suggestions that his embrace of the Democratic incumbent cost Republicans the White House.... When asked what went wrong for Romney last night, Christie deadpanned: “He didn’t get enough votes.” “I’m not a pundit, I’m an office holder,” Christie said.

The experts are wringing their hands trying to figure out why Romney didn’t win, but now we know: the 14 million missing voters from Romney’s column are Evangelicals. Evangelical Christians may not be evil people, but they helped an evil president become an evil dictator on Tuesday. The exact numbers aren’t in but clearly the vast majority of Evangelicals stayed home on Election Day. They weren’t dealing with a storm or a personal family emergency. They stayed home because they made a conscious decision to allow our Marxist enemy to continue ruining our lives rather than have Mormon Mitt Romney...

President Barack Obama won a slim majority of votes from self-identified Catholics, according to exit polls conduct by CNN. The polls shows that 50% of voters who identified themselves as Catholics voted for Obama, and 48% for Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The CNN poll did not distinguish between active and lapsed Catholics. Protestant voters swung heavily toward Romney, the CNN polls showed, with 57% choosing the Republican and only 42% voting to re-elect Obama. The initial reports on the CNN exit polls did not distinguish among the different Protestant denominations. Among voters who said they had no religious affiliation, Obama...

Columbus, Ohio — The realities of the electoral map meant that the Romney campaign really had no choice but to bet big on Ohio, and that bet was a loser. In addition to some critical on-the-ground specifics — Ohio is not hurting as badly as the rest of the country — there were three main reasons for that.1. Ohio likes crony capitalism. The automotive bailout is popular in Ohio, and not just among self-interested workers and investors in that industry. Putting General Motors on federal life support is economically daft and morally dubious, but it gave the Obama administration a powerful...