Also a loser: Massachussets Romney joins Kerry and Dukakis as Massachusetts pols who failed to unseat the incumbent party from the White House.
This is a pretty good piece ... http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/republicans-failed-to-understand-their-opponent/
Yeah, it's an interesting outpost among the whackos -- though there are a couple of whackos on that site too. I've been a regular reader during this election. It should be a good site for discussion of the election's aftermath on the GOP side too.
Yeah, their site is bookmarked on my home computer. I liked this tweet... AmericanConservative@amconmag The McGovern coalition—college students, white liberals, ethnic voters—is starting to look like the American majority theam.cn/VT4lQB
I was going to have this long post on the losers, but it would appear the bases have been covered. Bottom line: Mitt Romney will have fewer votes than John McCain or George W. Bush, Obama hemorrhaged 8 million votes but still kept all but two states (and NE-2) from his 2008 coalition.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Silver and of Sam Wang, because I do prefer empirical analysis of these things. That said, if the polls were garbage, nobody would've heard of these guys in the first place, because they would've been a lot more wrong in 2008 and 2010. So in the end, the real winner isn't Nate Silver or Sam Wang, but empirical polling analysis. It's the same with baseball. The real winner hasn't been Billy Beane or Bill James, but sabermetrics.
So now that the election is over and the black guy won, are the evangelicals going to revert back to their original position that mormons are heretics?
Well, I like it and I read it once or twice a week, but I do also recognize that they do employ Pat Buchanan as a columnist and that you don't have to look very far to find a nativist, isolationist bent among their other writers and columnists.
I think Mormons (or at least the LDS elite) are still a force to be reckoned with in American public life. They have the money, the cultural drive and the network of monied, well educated people that I think another presidential candidate seems inevitable. The evangelical will attach their support to whoever will take them on a ride.
I'm still waiting to see if post-election analysis reveals a drop in evangelical GOP support. Till the end I was hearing about evangelicals planning to write-in Jesus instead of voting for Mitt Romney. I'm sure it happened, not sure it was meaningful or measurable.
Crap. I have four more years of being inconvenienced by road closures, police escorts, and the Secret Service in SUVs.
I just checked -- the most improbable thing of last night's election: all three of my choices for town council won. I'm shocked.
One thing I won't miss is the endless wars. If Romney ahd gotten in, the ridiculous right would have hounded him into some God forsaken hell hole. I won't miss the sabre rattling at Iran that would have been should Mitt have made it. The current Republican party is cooked. No longer are the fiscal conservative "Eisenhower Republicans" in charge. Now its a loose band of religious nuts, tea partiers and homophobes. They really must change or die.
If this guy posted on bigsoccer, I'd rep this comment... Kinan says: November 7, 2012 at 12:34 pm I think this post sums up pretty neatly what’s been wrong with the GOP for the past decade at least, and probably more. And not just in the context of domestic politics (I’m thinking of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example). I’m reminded of an interview between Ron Suskind and Karl Rove that I read about in the mid-2000s, where Rove claimed that the US (ie the Bush Administration) could create its own reality. If I were a Republican, I’d be thinking that it’s about time to start pointing the finger most directly at right leaning media outlets (except this one, of course!) You can’t indugle others in fantasy if no one is willing to shovel it for you.
The tipping point is the state that gives you the decisive electoral vote. One way to obtain it is the following 1. Rank all the states in order of your margin of victory (with negative margins for the ones you lose). 2. Add up the electoral votes as you go down the list. 3. Whichever state gets you to 270 is the tipping point. In other words, it's the point where the election "tips" to you or the other candidate, since you need at least 270 EVs to win. If you flipped the ranking to the other candidate's viewpoint, the states would be in reverse order, but you would usually get exactly the same tipping point. The only exception would be a 269-269 tie, where you and your opponent would each need one state from the other side in order to make the election tip. Silver's model gave Colorado a 6.6% chance of being the tipping point, which is to say unlikely but not impossible. But if someone took the polls too much at face value, they wouldn't recognize this possibility at all. Colorado had fewer Electoral Votes and seemed harder to win than Ohio.
Yeah OK then Nate Silver's definition was the same as the media's. Difference is Nate always let you know front and center that it was unlikely that the election would have a tipping point, and that he expected a stronger Obama victory.
Bloomberg's endorsement of Obama was essentially in this vein. He refused to go along with deniers of climate change.
The Republican party will have to come full circle on immigration and social issues or it will quickly fade into oblivion. Their primary system is just going to kill off any reasonable candidate. Relative moderates like Romney and McCain are forced to go so far to the right that they become unelectable to the majority of the country. All they need to do is call George Bush. He won the Latino vote in 2004 by over 50% because he didn't try to sound tough on immigration and instead went out into the community, even joining a Mexican independence day marching and waving a Mexican flag. Could you see a current GOP candidate doing that today? You simply can't alienate hispanic voters by using rhetoric that makes it sound like they are illegal immigrants by association. You simply can't win the majority of women voters if every week your party's candidates are questioning whether women really want to be raped or not. Any discussion on economic policies are going to get drowned out in these groups. Romney still could have won this election however, it was tight enough. His main failure was his inability to convince enough people that he understood and empathized with their plight. He never shook the image that he was a rich out of touch white guy who had no idea what it was like to be poor. The Obama campaign started that portrait in 2011 and simply nailed it by election day. This election would never have been close if Obama had properly prepared for the first debate and not simply tried to slide through it without proper preparation.