US Presidential Election

[cromartie]

Cromrartie, I know you're a liberal (and probably pleased as punch this morning), so asking you a question about the state of American conservatism might be like a lamb consulting a lion, but... the impression I got from the 08 election was that evangelical voters didn't show up to support McCain. I remember there was a lot of talk about that at the time. Did the same thing happen yesterday? I don't really understand the role of religion in US politics, and wonder if you think Romney being a Mormon played a part in the less than enthusiastic embrace he got from right-wing voters. My impression from up here was that Romney was a far stronger candidate than McCain was, but the numbers this morning don't necessarily bear that out.

Cheers,

James

If I had known there was a party here, I'd have live blogged it. I may have even put pants on for the occasion.

The only point Mormonism rared it's head was very subtle. On more than one occasion, the Obama campaign made it a point to show pictures of the President drinking a beer. In fact, the White House has it's own microbrewery. I don't believe in coincidences.

At the Presidential level, this played out exactly as I thought it would in May. Indiana would revert to the mean and, because the Charlotte area was dependent upon the Financial industry and was hit hard by the recession, that North Carolina would flip. The answer to your Presidential question is this. Romney, both in organization and in fund raising, was a significantly stronger candidate than McCain. That said, he was still a weak speaker, relatively speaking, and the 47% tape, along with his position on the auto bailout (encouraging the automakers to rely on private bankruptcy financing when none was available) left a mark on a subset of blue collar rust belt voters that ultimately made the difference in Ohio. Let's add in a couple of other things as well. The microtargeting of demographic subsets of voters on the part of the Obama campaign is significantly ahead of the Republicans. (Note that this doesn't translate down ballot). I had the luxury of early voting in Ohio. The day after my ballot was received and processed, I stopped getting robocalls and literature drops from every Democratic candidate for office. Republican candidates for office, on the other hand, continued to call and leave literature (despite the fact I'm a registered Democrat) more or less continuously for the month between my absentee drop off and Election Day. Think of the waste of money and campaign resources.

Let's talk about where, at a Senate and Presidential level, the Republicans have problems. 88% of those who voted for Mitt Romney were white. The Republican Party, at this moment, is white, rural, aging and male. This is not demographically sustainable. If you look at the current red/blue map, over the next decade, if they do nothing, Texas, Arizona and Georgia will begin to turn purple. If they turn blue, the Republican Party is finished at the federal level, barring some sort of major screw up.

Thinking strategically, it's significant to note that the Republican Party got it's clock cleaned with Hispanic voters. This was the Hispanic voting bloc coming out party. I've spent a lot of the day reading, and one of the astonishing statistics I saw was that 60% of Hispanic voters either directly or indirectly knew someone who was in the country illegally. With that in mind, the Xenophobia the party stoked with anti-immigration referendums in 2004 and 2006 in order to drive up turnout needs to end. Even George W Bush had the good sense to try and push his party down a path of supporting amnesty. Strategically, it is probably wise of the Republicans in the House to work with the White House and Senate Democrats next year to, at a minimum, pass the Dream Act. Will this benefit Democrats? Yes. But it will take the issue of immigration off the table in time for the midterms and for the 2016 Presidential Election. At the federal level, Republicans have a deep Hispanic bench that the Democrats lack, and running a bilingual Hispanic candidate such as Marco Rubio somewhere on the ticket would help them make considerable in roads very quickly. If the Republicans remain obstructionist, it will harm them at the midterms in some traditionally red territory, particularly the Mountain West which, in the case of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, has already turned blue.

When we think about Senate races, there appears to be a ceiling on what would be considered "Tea Party" candidates in swing and blue states. Certainly a Pat Toomay can squeeze in in a wave year (He will lose in 2016) but there are three characteristics of swing states to examine: ethnic diversity, degree of urbanization and percentage of evangelicals. If you lose two of these three measures, a Republican candidate pushing a far right message can't win. So the ceiling for these types of candidates that tend to win state level primaries has been established.

Millennials are the next problem. I don't necessarily believe what I read when I read that Millennials are overwhelmingly liberal. (It's also a fallacy that people get more conservative when they age; 80% of people that vote for the same party's Presidential candidate in the first three elections in which they vote, vote that way their entire lives). They tend to be socially liberal, closer to libertarian in some ways, but are open to the cynical Republican fiscal message of "for you but not for them" or are more fatalistic about the availability of entitlements. Part of this libertarian bend manifests itself in the marijuana and gay marriage legalization referendums you saw passed last night. Millennials females, in addition, are strongly pro birth control and identify pretty strongly with the HIllary Clinton "safe, legal and rare" point of view on abortion.

While a center-right economic message may have some appeal, the evangelical based social view that Republican candidates espouse are a significant turn off. It doesn't matter if you speak Spanish if you are trying to negatively impact a woman's right to choose. So the tight rope here is how to appeal to a generation of voters that have a fundamentally different value system than your current core constituents (and largest donors).

Lest you think it's all doom and gloom, the good news is in the House. There are two significant weakness of the currently functioning Democratic Party. The first is that, for as good of a job as the Obama campaign has done in getting elected and re-elected, that success hasn't really trickled down to the house and gubernatorial level. The wave election of 2010 gave state control of Secretary of State offices and State houses to Republicans in many states, and they used it to Gerrymander in as many Republican districts as they could. Aggregate vote counts for House of Representative elections actually favor the Democrats, but you'll note the House remains in Republican control. Barring a wave I can't foresee at this point, it's likely to remain this way until 2020. The second is that the coalition you saw last night doesn't really show up during off year elections. So while Obama the candidate and campaigner has done a great job, the Democratic Party in general hasn't succeeded in the manner one might like.

So yes, I'm quite pleased. I"m pleased because I like the President, but more importantly because the demographic realities of the electorate now dictate that the 44 year ceaseless rightward drift of the federal government is essentially over. The Republican Party now has to move beyond the Southern Strategy or face irrelevance. This is a tough task, because there is a great deal of money being made by a significant number of people off of holding this demographic's attention. It should be interesting to watch.

[Toppy Vann]

Welcome to the alternate universe where Romney wins courtesy of your Vancouver Sun:

[WestCoastJoe]

Thanks, cromartie.

Interesting read.

[WestCoastJoe]

Lots of interesting articles about the election, and of course about the challenges facing the Republican Party. Still some denial going on there ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/po ... wanted=all

Demographic Shift Brings New Worry for Republicans

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: November 7, 2012

A couple of decades ago, Prince William County was one of the mostly white, somewhat rural, far-flung suburbs where Republican candidates went to accumulate the votes to win elections in Virginia.

Since then, Prince William has been transformed. Open tracts have given way to town houses and gated developments, as the county — about a half-hour south of Washington — has risen to have the seventh-highest household income in the country and has become the first county in Virginia where minorities make up more than half the population.

If Prince William looks like the future of the country, Democrats have so far developed a much more successful strategy of appealing to that future. On Tuesday, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by almost 15 percentage points in Prince William, nearly doubling George W. Bush’s margin over Al Gore in 2000, helping Mr. Obama to a surprisingly large victory in Virginia.

He did it not only by winning Hispanic voters, but also by winning strong majorities of the growing number of Asian-American voters and of voters under age 40. A version of his coalition in Virginia — a combination of minorities, women and younger adults — also helped Mr. Obama win Colorado, Nevada and perhaps Florida, which remained too close to call. He came close in North Carolina, a reliable state for Republican presidential nominees only a few years ago that he narrowly won in 2008.

The demographic changes in the American electorate have come with striking speed and have left many Republicans, who have not won as many electoral votes as Mr. Obama did on Tuesday in 24 years, concerned about their future. The Republicans’ Southern strategy, of appealing mostly to white voters, appears to have run into a demographic wall.

“Before, we thought it was an important issue, improving demographically,” said Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. “Now, we know it’s an essential issue. You have to ignore reality not to deal with this issue.”

The central problem for Republicans is that the Democrats’ biggest constituencies are growing. Asian-Americans, for example, made up 3 percent of the electorate, up from 2 percent in 2008, and went for Mr. Obama by about 47 percentage points. Republicans increasingly rely on older white voters. And contrary to much conventional wisdom, voters do not necessarily grow more conservative as they age; until the last decade, a majority of both younger and older voters both tended to go to the winner of the presidential election.

This year, Mr. Obama managed to win a second term despite winning only 39 percent of white voters and 44 percent of voters older than 65, according to exit polls not yet finalized conducted by Edison Research. White men made up only about one-quarter of Mr. Obama’s voters. In the House of Representatives next year, for the first time, white men will make up less than half of the Democratic caucus.

The Republican Party “needs messages and policies that appeal to a broader audience,” said Mark McKinnon, a former strategist for George W. Bush. “This election proved that trying to expand a shrinking base ain’t going to cut it. It’s time to put some compassion back in conservatism. The party needs more tolerance, more diversity and a deeper appreciation for the concerns of the middle class.”

Nothing in politics is permanent, and Republicans may soon find ways to appeal to minorities and younger voters. As Hispanic and Asian voters continue to move up the income scale, for example, more of them may turn skeptical about Democratic calls to raise taxes on the affluent.

And the Democrats may yet confront their own demographic challenges once they no longer have Mr. Obama and his billion-dollar campaign machine at the top of the ticket, guaranteeing record-breaking turnout among his new Democratic coalition. If turnout among blacks, Hispanics and younger voters — groups that have historically had comparatively low turnout rates — had declined slightly, Mr. Obama might have lost.

But the immediate question for Republicans, people in the party say, is how to improve their image with voters they are already losing in large numbers.

“You don’t have to sell out on the issues and suddenly take on the Democratic position on taxes to win the black vote or the Latino vote or the women vote,” said Corey Stewart, a Republican who is chairman of the Board of County Supervisors in Prince William. “But you do have to modulate your tone.”

Mr. Stewart, who is running for lieutenant governor next year, drew some criticism in 2007 by pushing for local crackdowns by the police on illegal immigrants. That has cost him support among many Hispanic voters in the county, but he says it helped him politically among blacks who felt threatened economically by the surge of newcomers.

“The changes are stark,” he said. “The minority population is increasing, and the white population is stagnant.”

Mr. Stewart said he had spent much time in the county’s minority areas and contrasted his political success with the failure of Mr. Romney, whose only planned visit to Prince William was in the western town of Haymarket, a wealthy, white part of the county.

“He did not go into the minority areas,” Mr. Stewart said. “They didn’t go into the areas where they didn’t feel comfortable. They tended to go to areas where they already had their votes, in heavily white areas.”

In Prince William, as elsewhere, the biggest challenge for Republicans may be among Hispanic voters, given their numbers. Mr. Obama’s victories in Colorado, Nevada and Virginia came in part because Hispanics turned out in droves and voted Democratic. In Colorado, 14 percent of the voters were Hispanic, and Mr. Obama won three-fourths of them. In Florida, Hispanic voters were almost one-fifth of the electorate, and Mr. Obama won about three-fifths of them.

Mr. Cardenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a loyal supporter of Mr. Romney’s, says his party would never earn their support until it found a new to address of illegal immigration.

“We need to check off that box; we need to get immigration reform done in 2013,” he said. “We need to show that Republicans are willing to sit at the table and reach a compromise that is in keeping with what the Hispanic community wants and needs.”

Even that issue brings risks, though, because any immigration bill that passed in 2013 would be signed by and associated with a Democratic president. The harder challenge for Republicans will be developing proposals that minority and younger voters associate with the party — and support.

In Prince William, the Hispanic population tripled from 2000 to 2010, much of it along the Route 1 corridor in Dale City. But Tom Davis, who used to represent Dale City as a Republican member of Congress, said that the problem for his former colleagues goes beyond just Hispanic outreach.

The party’s coalition is contracting, not expanding, he says. It has to find a way to broaden its reach, in part by finding more minority and female candidates to run under the Republican banner, Mr. Davis argues. And he said the outreach had to be real: “It’s not just putting them into the photo-ops at the convention.”

Republicans like Mr. Davis — and some inside Mr. Romney’s campaign — are quick to point out that the election this week was close, not a blowout. Mr. Davis said that it was “not time to panic” for Republicans. But he said Republicans must be honest with themselves about the future.

“It is time to sit down practically and say where are we going to add pieces to our coalition,” he said. “There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win. There’s just not enough of them.”

[Toppy Vann]

It is going to be a Barack Obama win and possibly a landslide.

Romney will be deemed a pariah and his political career OVER like Sarah Palin as the GOP will make it the night of the long knives fast. Even Karl Rove who called a Romney landslide is preparing the spin these past few days blaming it on Sandy.

Only got to wonder if voter suppression will work for the GOP but I think the guy who called (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com) Some rumours (NOT founded) that machines in some states are changing votes from Obama to Romney. This is not proven yet.


Obama Electoral Vote
313.0 (+14.0 since Oct. 30)

Romney
225.0 (-14.0 since Oct. 30)

Perhaps the most well-known of these aggregators is Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight blog -- a reference to the total number of electoral votes available -- for The New York Times and who first established a reputation for accurate election modeling during the 2008 Democratic primaries, and then bolstered it by nailing 49 out of 50 states in that year's general election. This time around, Silver has forecast Obama's re-election consistently since launching the 2012 version of his so-called Political Calculus in June, relying on a complex recipe that starts with endless polls, weights them by historical accuracy, throws in a dash of economic indicators, sprinkles on some demographic data, and stirs it all together in order to run thousands of simulated elections.

But Silver has paid the price for bucking the ever-equivocating national polls. In recent weeks, Silver regularly pegged the odds of Obama winning at more than 70 percent (it's currently at 92.2 percent) -- even when Romney seemed to pull ahead for a time in national polling. Some began to mock Silver's methods, despite (or perhaps because of) his being thought of in Democratic circles as a genius, or a savant.

Silver, though, is a statistician, and to him, his numbers told everything he -- and his readers -- needed to know. "You may have noticed some pushback about our contention that Barack Obama is a favorite (and certainly not a lock) to be re-elected," he wrote on November 2. "I haven't come across too many analyses suggesting that Mitt Romney is the favorite. (There are exceptions.) But there are plenty of people who say that the race is a 'tossup.' What I find confounding about this is that the argument we're making is exceedingly simple. Here it is: Obama's ahead in Ohio."

I just went with this guy over the rest and added possibly the 'Bama landslide comment and Silver called every state right this election and did better than 2008.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la ... 9768.story

Parsing polls: Nate Silver picks on target, Rasmussen not so much

The verdict is in on polling for the 2012 presidential race. New York Times statistical savant Nate Silver’s projections came very close to the actual outcome on both popular vote and the electoral college.
Gallup and Fox News favorite Rasmussen Reports — whose surveys consistently predicted a better outcome for Republican Mitt Romney — missed the mark.

S

ilver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at nytimes.com had made a final prediction of 313 electoral votes for President Obama to 225 electoral votes for Romney. Obama had 303 electoral votes in the bag by early Wednesday morning. If the president maintains his slim lead in Florida, which stood at 47,000 votes Wednesday afternoon, he will finish with 332 electoral votes.

Silver projected a 2.5-percentage-point popular vote edge for Obama. The margin stood at 2 points, with some ballots still to be counted.

Gallup’s national tracking poll, in contrast, had shown Romney with a lead of as much as 5 points. It stopped daily tracking in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, and one day before the election showed the Republican nominee leading by 1 point. Rasmussen’s final tracking poll also showed Romney with a 1-point lead.

[WestCoastJoe]

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/wh ... e-mostpop2

Why the GOP Will Double Down on a Losing Strategy

By Michael GrunwaldNov. 07, 201258 Comments

The thing about an Etch a Sketch is that the picture never looks real. Mitt Romney‘s attempt to draw one self-portrait for the Republican primaries and a different one for the general election left voters unconvinced that he knew who he was. So how could they?

Republican primaries have become Tea Party litmus tests, forcing candidates to audition for a lily-white, antiurban base that feels like Archie Bunker and Ward Cleaver in an era of Modern Family and Dora the Explorer. Romney, who governed Massachusetts as a centrist, had to sprint right to prove his “severely conservative” bona fides against primary rivals like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, giving President Obama general-election ammunition on issues like immigration, taxes, energy and popular spending programs like FEMA. Meanwhile, for the second straight election cycle, the GOP missed a chance to seize control of the Senate when no-compromise Tea Partyers like Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana beat more electable candidates in their primaries.

Now it’s recrimination time. After the historic GOP congressional wave in 2010, many Republicans were sure Obama was destined for defeat in 2012. An incumbent who had presided over four years of high unemployment — and whose overwhelming unpopularity was discussed as an immutable fact on Fox News and talk radio — seemed ripe for the picking. His re-election has some party leaders worried that the GOP is out of step with demographic and ideological trends, preaching to a shrinking choir. They do not want to be what Congressman turned TV host Joe Scarborough has despairingly called “the stupid party,” with retro in-the-bubble ideas about rape, contraception and “self-deportation” that alienate a modern multicultural electorate.

But for all the punditry about a coming Republican civil war, it’s not clear that the party really wants to change in any serious way — or that it could change if it wanted to. Even GOP elites, while concerned that winnable races are being sacrificed on the altar of extremism, suggest that the party is likely to stay the course that worked in 2010. Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former Republican political consultant, has been a consistent voice for pragmatism over purity inside the party, but he doesn’t foresee any radical shifts after Tuesday’s split decision. “It’s sobering that we’re throwing away Senate seats. But I don’t see a great schism,” Cole says. “I see a very unified, very conservative party that’s very alarmed about the growth of government. Who would be the generals in our great civil war?”

Superglued to the Past
Just about all republicans acknowledge their party’s demographic dilemma. The electorate keeps getting less white, less rural and less evangelical — in short, less traditionally Republican. Polls suggested that Obama was on track to receive more than 90% of the black vote and over two-thirds of the fast-growing Latino vote, while winning huge majorities among young voters, gays and single women. The homogeneity of the Republican conventioneers who nominated Romney in Tampa was striking, especially compared with the Democratic diversity on display the next week in Charlotte. It’s working for the GOP in the old Confederacy, but nobody thinks that’s sustainable nationwide in the long term.

Some Republicans believe that the party needs to cut a deal with Obama on immigration reform so Latinos will stop seeing the party as a hostile force. New Mexico has morphed from swing state into blue state; Arizona may soon drift from red state to swing state. But others blame at least some of the GOP’s problems with voters of color on the unusual phenomenon of a President of color. They believe the party is gradually broadening its appeal, citing rising Hispanic stars like Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and newly elected Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina GOP Congressman, argues that his party doesn’t need to change its policies to pander to minorities; it just needs to work harder to sell its policies to them. “Are we more diverse now? Yes. By leaps and bounds? No,” he says. “We’ve got to reach out to a broader array of Americans. But we’ve still got to stay true to who we are and what we believe.”

It’s the “what we believe” part that could cause Republicans more problems down the road. In the Obama era, the GOP has coalesced around an agenda that in some ways simply denies reality, rejecting the science of climate change, insisting that government (except the Pentagon) is incapable of creating jobs, denouncing debt while proposing debt-exploding tax cuts. Some of its fire breathers argued last year that shutting down the federal government and even defaulting on its obligations could be good for the economy; more recently, its leaders suppressed a Congressional Research Service report questioning supply-side dogma. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, an accomplished fiscal conservative feared as a formidable potential opponent by Team Obama, may have doomed his primary chances with one tweet: “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Republican voters did, but then polls show most GOP regulars don’t even believe Obama is a Christian, many doubt he is a native-born citizen, and few changed their mind after he released his birth certificate. In April 2011, the birther Donald Trump actually topped the Republican presidential-primary polls.

Some elements of the Republican agenda are standard for a center-right party: lower taxes, smaller government, less regulation. But in the Obama era, the GOP has pushed far beyond center right. In 2008 every Republican presidential candidate had an economic-stimulus plan — Romney’s was the largest — and John McCain, the nominee, had a cap-and-trade plan for energy. By 2009 the GOP was united against stimulus, cap-and-tax and a health care plan nearly identical to the one Romney crafted in Massachusetts. Polls show increasing support in the U.S. for gay rights and broad support for clean energy, but most Republicans are superglued to the other side. The party has also doubled down on its unpopular efforts to protect Wall Street from regulation, eliminate funding for Big Bird and extend tax cuts for the rich. Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, authored a bold plan to end Medicare’s guarantees and shrink nondefense spending, but it was so politically toxic that the Romney campaign abandoned it, relentlessly attacking Obama for Medicare cuts that were part of Ryan’s plan as well.

The GOP’s moderate wing has been dwindling for years. Olympia Snowe’s retirement and Scott Brown’s defeat will leave Susan Collins as about the only Republican centrist in the Senate. And on Capitol Hill, even pragmatically inclined conservatives have been reluctant to compromise with Obama on anything, aware that even minor deviations could inspire the free-market Club for Growth to bankroll a Tea Party primary challenge like the ones that ended the careers of Senators Bob Bennett of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana. Club for Growth president Chris Chocola recalls that Utah’s Orrin Hatch, who had a reputation as an ideological squish, called him the day after Bennett lost — and has been a reliable conservative ever since to protect his right flank. “Members take notice of what we do, and that’s great,” Chocola says. “We’re not interested in helping Republicans win a majority so they can grow government a bit slower than the Democrats. We want to elect principled fiscal conservatives.”

To party elites like lobbyist Ed Rogers, there’s a fine line between principled fiscal conservatism, which he supports, and politically suicidal dogmatism, which leads to candidates like Akin and Mourdock. “We have an angry fist-shaking caucus that says losing with purity is better than winning with nuance, which is crazy,” Rogers says. For four years, Republican politicians have portrayed Obama as a dangerous radical and fought him full time. It’s going to be hard to cut deals with him to solve problems like the looming fiscal cliff without alienating Republican voters who believed what they said. “We’re probably one e-mail away from Benghazi being an impeachable offense for much of our party,” Rogers says. “I think that’s nuts, but that’s where we are right now.”

There are already signs that the party of no intends to continue its strategy of no. Even before the election, House Speaker John Boehner warned that he’d have a mandate too and that Obama would poison the well by pursuing Democratic priorities in a second term. “Obama seems to think that we’re going to have an epiphany and do what he wants us to do. That’s not going to happen,” says Cole, who is on the dealmaking side of the GOP divide. Rogers, another political pragmatist, is just as insistent that Republicans will not let Obama have his way. “You won’t see any me-too-ism. None. Zero,” he says. “Nothing about this election will diminish the right wing.”

How Long Will It Take?
The GOP response to huge losses in 2006 and 2008 was to move even further right. Many Republicans believe that President George W. Bush’s problem was overspending and that McCain was too liberal as well. That strategy worked in 2010, and many conservatives think it could have worked again in 2012 if Romney had been a credible spokesman for their principles. Chocola points out that his predecessor at the Club for Growth, Pat Toomey, is now a blue-state Senator from Pennsylvania. “There’s a great power in a clear message,” Chocola says. “Romney always had a sincerity problem.”

As centrists have abandoned the GOP, the power of the base has gotten even stronger inside the party, further reducing the allure of centrist policies, which has further alienated centrists. It’s a closed feedback loop, and GOP veterans do not expect Tuesday’s disappointing but not catastrophic losses to break it before the next election cycle. The party’s voters and funders are not looking for compromise, so its leaders are likely to double down on fossil-fueled, Wall Street–friendly obstructionism. Ryan, a devout supply-sider who is also more socially conservative than Romney, is likely to emerge as an even more central player in Congress and in the offstage struggle to lead the party; Rubio and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal have similar ideological profiles and ambitions. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had won fans with his aggressive liberal-bashing despite some policy moderation, infuriated many in the party with his enthusiastic praise of Obama after Hurricane Sandy.

Of course, 2016 is ages from now. While there will surely be some intraparty sniping during the next few months, for now, Republicans seem likely to stick with their playbook and cater to their base. Even as that base gets older, angrier and less representative of America.

[WestCoastJoe]

It’s the “what we believe” part that could cause Republicans more problems down the road. In the Obama era, the GOP has coalesced around an agenda that in some ways simply denies reality, rejecting the science of climate change, insisting that government (except the Pentagon) is incapable of creating jobs, denouncing debt while proposing debt-exploding tax cuts. Some of its fire breathers argued last year that shutting down the federal government and even defaulting on its obligations could be good for the economy; more recently, its leaders suppressed a Congressional Research Service report questioning supply-side dogma. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, an accomplished fiscal conservative feared as a formidable potential opponent by Team Obama, may have doomed his primary chances with one tweet: “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Republican voters did, but then polls show most GOP regulars don’t even believe Obama is a Christian, many doubt he is a native-born citizen, and few changed their mind after he released his birth certificate. In April 2011, the birther Donald Trump actually topped the Republican presidential-primary polls.

“I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” - Jon Huntsman, rejected Republican candidate.

polls show most GOP regulars don’t even believe Obama is a Christian

many doubt he is a native-born citizen

and few changed their mind after he released his birth certificate

In April 2011, the birther Donald Trump actually topped the Republican presidential-primary polls.

Yeah, well there was also Rick Perry. Michelle Bachmann. Sarah Palin in 2008.

[WestCoastJoe]

Republican Party begins election review to find out what went wrong

By Peter Wallsten, Updated: Thursday, November 8, 6:04 PM

Top Republican officials, stunned by the extent of their election losses Tuesday night, have begun an exhaustive review to figure out what went so wrong and how to fix it.

Party leaders said they already had planned to poll voters in battleground states starting Tuesday night in anticipation of a Mitt Romney victory — to immediately begin laying the groundwork for midterm congressional elections and a Romney 2016 reelection bid.

But as they watched one state after another go to President Obama and Senate seats fall away, party leaders quickly expanded and retooled their efforts. Officials told The Washington Post that they’re planning a series of voter-based polls and focus groups, meetings with constituency group leaders, and in-depth discussions with their volunteers, donors and staff members to find ways to broaden their appeal.

The review is a recognition that party leaders were confounded by the electorate that showed up on Tuesday. Republican officials said that they met all of their turnout goals but that they underestimated who would turn out for the other side.

Party officials said the review is aimed at studying their tactics and message, not at changing the philosophical underpinnings of the party.

“This is no different than a patient going to see a doctor,” said Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s spokesman. “Your number one thing is to say, ‘I’m not feeling well. Tell me what the problem is. Run some tests on me.’ ”

Tuesday’s results, along with national and state-level exit polls, illustrated the depth of the GOP’s challenges and its growing weaknesses among crucial constituencies, such as Hispanics and women.

Many Hispanics were turned off by tough talk on immigration from Romney during the primary campaign, while Democrats think their candidates benefited from Republican policies on women’s health issues and verbal miscues on rape.

Underscoring the thoroughness of the GOP defeat, a Florida exit poll showed that Cuban Americans went for Obama by 49 percent to 47 percent — a watershed moment for a group that has been solidly Republican for a generation.

The review comes amid signs that the election results have pushed some conservative leaders and officials to consider tackling one of the most politically touchy issues for many Republicans: whether to put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. For years, conservatives have blocked immigration legislation. But seeing Obama win seven in 10 Hispanic voters appears to have left some wondering whether it is time to compromise, particularly with the president pledging to make the issue a centerpiece of his second-term agenda.

The Internet was buzzing late Thursday as word spread that Fox News Channel commentator Sean Hannity declared he had “evolved” on the issue and now thinks illegal immigrants without criminal records should have a “pathway to citizenship.”

In an interview Thursday with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said the immigration issue “has been around far too long.” He said a “comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”

Asked about the GOP’s demographic problems, Boehner said: “What Republicans need to learn is: How do we speak to all Americans? You know, not just the people who look like us and act like us, but how do we speak to all Americans?”

Although Democrats argue that Tuesday’s results point to a potentially long-lasting winning coalition, Republicans are fighting among themselves about what went wrong.

Some party leaders have blamed the losses on the rise of the tea party movement and the growing pressure on GOP candidates to hew to a purist brand of conservatism that wins primaries but turns off voters. Others have taken the opposite view, blaming party establishment leaders and Romney for trying to play to the middle.

RNC officials say their results will help guide Republican lawmakers and governors as they tackle sensitive issues.

The committee’s move suggests that Chairman Reince Priebus, who will face reelection in January, may be trying to fill a void left by Romney’s loss and the lack of a party leader focused on political strategy.

The review began on election night with polls in key states, and next week the party will begin a string of voter focus groups.

Priebus and other party officials also will meet with constituency-group leaders representing Hispanics, African Americans, veterans, evangelicals, tea party activists, business groups, youth voters, centrists, Asian Americans and women.

Party officials plan to delve deeply into the Hispanic community, with separate focus group sessions being devoted to Puerto Ricans, a key bloc in central Florida that strongly backed Obama, as well as Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans. Mexican Americans make up the bulk of Hispanic voters in the battleground states of Colorado and Nevada.

The RNC’s review, to be conducted over the next two months and handled in some cases by independent firms, will look at the party’s get-out-the-vote operations, its national field staff and tactics, online voter-targeting strategy, and donor relationships. About 150,000 volunteers and 600 staff members will be queried on such topics as the quality of the party’s technology and voter-contact database to see if other factors contributed to their losses.

“We lost Wisconsin and Iowa, and we didn’t lose those because of the Hispanic vote,” Spicer said. “This is not a one-trick-pony problem.”

The review is designed in part to identify the positives, as well, and keep them in place for the future, he said.

Yet, whatever the Republicans did well, the Democrats did it better. That’s why another piece of the GOP review will include a study of Obama’s political machinery, including the sprawling network of neighborhood captains and activists in place since the 2008 campaign that appeared to roar back to life in time for Tuesday.

“We’ve got to know what they did well,” Spicer said. “We’ve got to give them credit, they won. We need to know what we’re going to be up against in 2013, 2014 and 2016.”

[WestCoastJoe]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... ml?hpid=z3

Michael Gerson Opinion Writer
Rebuilding the GOP’s appeal

The 2012 election was a substantial victory not only for President Obama but also for liberalism. Obama built his campaign on abortion rights and higher taxes for the wealthy. He was rewarded by an electorate that was younger, more pro-choice and more racially diverse than in 2008. The Obama coalition is not a fluke; it is a force.

Some conservatives have reacted in the tradition of Cicero: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”Rush Limbaugh concluded, “We’ve lost the country,” which he described as a “country of children.” “There is no hope,” Ann Coulter said. And Bill O’Reilly: “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

As a matter of strategy, it is generally not a good idea to express disdain for an electorate one hopes to eventually influence. In this case, despair is also an overreaction. Conservatives have not witnessed the sacking of Rome. They have seen the disappointment of their expectation that the 2010 Republican wave election was an inexorable trend. They have seen politically unfavorable demographic changes — which everyone knew were coming sooner or later — come sooner. They have seen younger voters grow more libertarian on some social issues.

These changes call for another, more hopeful conservative tradition: that of Edmund Burke. He saw social change as a constant. The goal was to ease a nation’s way through change while retaining what is strongest in its traditions. Burke insisted that the present was better than the past and that the future could be better still if change were grounded in a society’s basic character. And he believed that politics had to suit a society’s real circumstances, not an idealized version of them.

This is the conservative task over the next few years: not to preserve a rigid ideology but to reconstruct a political appeal along improved but principled lines.

Some of the most important intellectual groundwork is needed on the role of government. Mitt Romney had a five-part plan to encourage job creation. He lacked a public philosophy that explained government’s valid role in meeting human needs. Suburban women heard little about improved public education. Single women, particularly single mothers, heard little about their struggles, apart from an off-putting Republican critique of food stamps. Blue-collar workers in, say, Ohio heard little about the unique challenges that face declining industrial communities. Latinos heard little from Republicans about promoting equal opportunity and economic mobility.

Neither a vague, pro-business orientation nor tea party ideology speaks to these Americans — except perhaps to alienate them. Conservatives will need to define a role for government that addresses human needs in effective, market-oriented ways. Americans fear public debt, and they resent intrusive bureaucracies, but they do not hate government.

Conservatives also face challenges on issues of national identity. The right will always stand for nationalism and patriotism. But during the Republican primaries, those commitments were expressed as the exclusion of outsiders — in self-deportation and the building of walls. The tone was nasty and small. Apart from moral objections, this approach is no longer politically sustainable. Romney won the largest percentage of white voters of any Republican since 1988. He carried both independents and senior citizens. Yet that wasn’t nearly enough. Republicans won’t win future elections with 27 percent support from Latinos, Romney’s dismal achievement. And Republicans won’t increase that support if they favor self-deportation.

The alternative is a vision of American identity preserved by the assimilating power of American ideals. And that would lead Republicans to endorse the Dream Act and to support a rigorous path to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the country.

Republican adjustments to cultural trends, particularly among millennials, will be difficult — although candidates could start by being unambiguous in their condemnations of rape. In fact, the tone taken by most Republicans on cultural issues has shifted considerably over the past several years. The pro-life movement has become more realistic and incremental. Republican opposition to gay marriage is increasingly falling back to the defense of institutional religious freedom. With nearly 50 percent of Romney’s support coming from religious conservatives, there is no rational strategy that employs them as a political foil. But it is more advisable than ever to make public arguments about morality in aspirational rather than judgmental ways.

The Romney campaign was a vast machine with one moving part, its economic critique. The next Republican campaign will need to be capable of complex adjustments of ideology, policy and rhetoric. And it will need one more thing: a candidate with a genuine, creative passion for inclusion.

[WestCoastJoe]

From Bloomberg ...

And another myth is the Republican Party as the one that practices good fiscal management, balanced budgets, and reduction of the public debt.

Just IMO ...

[Toppy Vann]

Conservatives in Canada and GOP in the USA are profligate spenders.

The Clinton balanced budgets were because in Bob Woodward's book it says his Treas. Sec'y Lloyd Bentsen had Pres-Elect WJC meet with Greenspan who warned him that if they didn't budget right his deficit by the time of a run for his second term would be out of control.

George Bush put two wars on the credit card (White House budget office which is independent say this) to the cheers of the base and got re-elected doing it. His policies made friends and firms close to Dick Cheney rich.

As Bill Clinton says more jobs created by Dems than GOP since JFK was in office.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/07/polit ... index.html

"Since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24," Clinton said. "In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the job score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42."

That is why it is frustrating to listen to the lying guys in the GOP and the idiots from the public being interviewed on CNN who try to spin it the other way and say the opposite to the facts! The public saying how the DEMs will now ruin the USA amazes me. It has been the radical right GOP ruining their nation fiscally and reputationally around the world.

[WestCoastJoe]

The final electoral map ... Florida goes to Obama. Final tally 332 for Obama, 206 for Romney.

Democrats making inroads in Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and Virginia. Swing states that have gone to either party in recent elections.

Unless the Republican Party changes some basic tenets of its philosophy, I don't see much room for growth in their constituents.

The Blue and the Red. The map looks kind of like the Union and the Confederacy, the Blue and the Grey. Of the 11 Confederate states in 1861, only Florida voted Democrat this time (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia). Virginia was split up and its vote is split now. It still looks kind of like a divide between North and South. Looks that way ...

Surprised to find how small the population was in the 1860s. 140,000 in Florida. 604,000 in Texas. 31,400,000 total in the entire United States. Amazing.

[Toppy Vann]

The most accurate polling this election was Nate Silver www.fivethirtyeight.com a NY Times blogger who in the heat he was taking said 'wanna bet $1000s for charity.'
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... more-37396


Gallup - a vastly overrated political polling organization and their 12 question very high cost employee engagement survey is fine but provides firms with little details. But they get that business from firms who use their results in their marketing.

It was one of the best-known polling firms, however, that had among the worst results. In late October, Gallup consistently showed Mr. Romney ahead by about six percentage points among likely voters, far different from the average of other surveys. Gallup’s final poll of the election, which had Mr. Romney up by one point, was slightly better, but still identified the wrong winner in the election. Gallup has now had three poor elections in a row. In 2008, their polls overestimated Mr. Obama’s performance, while in 2010, they overestimated how well Republicans would do in the race for the United States House.