Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics breaks down the break down. The short answer to why Romney lost is that he failed to get the rural white vote out. What a major failure. He should have had those people in his pocket. Very disappointing.
An excerpt:
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...
Put another way: The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator, it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator...
But in terms of interpreting elections, and analyzing the future, the substantial drop-off in the white vote is a significant data point. Had Latino and African-American voters turned out in massive numbers, we might really be talking about a realignment of sorts, although we would have to see if the Democrats could sustain it with someone other than Obama atop the ticket (they could not do so in 2010). As it stands, the bigger puzzle for figuring out the path of American politics is who these non-voters are, why they stayed home, and whether they might be reactivated in 2016 (by either party).
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Sep '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
rural white vote out
Tastes like chicken. And video games. And television. And...
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 5:35pmNov '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
The UP didn't get bombarded with the Bain ads like Ohio did.
Mar '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
So Jeff Foxworthy has a new joke to add to his repertoire - "If you didn't like Mitt Romney OR Barack Obama and you sat home this past Election Day...you just might be a Redneck."
Great.
Jul '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
That's true.
It is also true that Gov. Snyder didn't force through an unpopular union busting maneuver like Gov. Kasich did. A drop in Ohio's rural white vote might have less to do with Presidential campaigns and more to do with OH-specific circumstances.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Quinn the Eskimo
I'd love to know the answer to this one, but how do you exit poll people who don't show up to the polls to start? · 29 minutes ago
Good point.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Correction: Has anyone done [[the exit]] "a" poll on the M-word yet?
Mar '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
What this tells me is that we "unsophisticated" folks (though I did vote) didn't see a substantial difference between the two tickets, no matter how much the pundit class and GOP talking heads tried to convince us there was one. Give us a real conservative with a record of getting things done and we will vote for him. In droves.
We may be unsophisticated, but we aren't stupid.
Mar '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Or her. *wink*
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 6:11pmMar '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Sean Trende acknowledges that this is a very preliminary conclusion; we haven't counted literally millions of votes (absentees, provisional ballots) yet. But it is an intriguing analysis of one state--Ohio. Ohio voters, of course were bombarded from early summer with anti-Bain ads--which ironically may have had extra resonance with white rural voters who followed the Republican primary debates, where Santorum, Gingrich and Perry pounded the same theme.
Ricochetoise may have little clue how disenchanted white blue collar voters are with the entire economic-political process. I think of it as a larger shadow of the Tea Party movement. The 2008 meltdown confirmed their worst New Deal fears about Republican stewardship of a globalizing economy; Obama's indifference to their lot seems clear after 4 years. Is staying home really so unthinkable? Ascribing such behavior to anti-Mormon bias is suspiciously close to the Left's caricaturing of them as redneck bigots.
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 6:20pmOct '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
When you don't believe what you say, few will believe what you say.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Gus Marvinson
Or her. *wink* · 18 minutes ago
Edited 8 minutes ago
Sarah Palin would have struggled to get 44% of the vote.
Mar '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
wmartin
Gus Marvinson
Or her. *wink* · 18 minutes ago
Edited 8 minutes ago
Sarah Palin would have struggled to get 44% of the vote. · 11 minutes ago
Nah. Palin's struggle will always be getting nominated because the GOP brass is scared to death of her. Had she run, and managed to get through the primaries and become the nominee, she would have defeated Obama. Why? Because she is an unabashed conservative with a fighting spirit who speaks like a regular person, never condescending. This stuff really isn't as complex as we like to make it here on Ricochet.
It doesn't have to be Palin, but somebody with a spine needs to rise up and be the conservative standard bearer.
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 6:48pmSep '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
I think hits the nail on the head. Blue collar America has an apathy problem and the path forward is addressing that. It's not apathy because they don't care what happens to America - it's because they see all politicians as corrupt liars. By the time election day rolls around the only consideration they see is the end of political ads. The old notion of civic duty is just that, 'old'. The question before us is how to engage these folks in a way that isn't off putting.
Jul '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Somehow, I think that John Boehner and the rest of the leadership in the House after the 2010 vote, were responsible for the election loss. They did essentially nothing and said nothing in the last two years. I would have expected that they would have brought things to the brink. But no, they caved over and over. Then they agreed to the Sequester. They are worthless. Basta ya!
Then Romney got so hung upon appealing to undecideds or moderates or whoever. Obamacare was they main lever, and he refused to use it. He refused to beat up on Big Government. Really, Romney just uttered slogans. Even Ryan was turned into a sloganeer. Not really appealing. I voted for them, I see others not doing so, more staying home, which they did. The "sophisticated" Romney brain trust forgot their base. So, their base forgot them. (While Obama was jumping up and down to get out his base.) Is this so strange or hard to understand?
Jul '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
I want to add something about why I say Ryan and Romney only uttered slogans. They explained nothing. Reagan could and did explain. ...with concrete examples. Often he was criticized for using anecdotes, but it was an effective way to argue and explain. Concreteness, Ladies an dGentlemen. The use of slogans is so insulting. Who do they think would go for this?
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Gus Marvinson
wmartin
Gus Marvinson
Or her. *wink* · 18 minutes ago
Edited 8 minutes ago
Sarah Palin would have struggled to get 44% of the vote. · 11 minutes ago
Nah. Palin's struggle will always be getting nominated because the GOP brass is scared to death of her. Had she run, and managed to get through the primaries and become the nominee, she would have defeated Obama. Why? Because she is an unabashed conservative with a fighting spirit who speaks like a regular person, never condescending. This stuff really isn't as complex as we like to make it here on Ricochet.
It doesn't have to be Palin, but somebody with a spine needs to rise up and be the conservative standard bearer. · 22 minutes ago
Edited 19 minutes ago
Denial.
Mar '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Good. The Obama "ground game" meme takes a bit of a hit. His organizers did a good job, but a relatively minor shift in Republican turnout would have carried the day.
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 7:24pmOct '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Maybe over the next four years, it will dawn on those "unsophisticated" voters that there was a big difference between the two. If energy prices continue to skyrocket, if employers cut back due the piling on of more regulation and mandates, if churches are required to do things that violate their faith, they will probably notice. And if they are somehow surprised, then "stupid" isn't too harsh of a term, because these items were all part of Obama's platform.
The fact that Obama's overt hostility to rural and suburban whites didn't get them out to vote is sad, and somehow I think that they will soon come to regret staying home, even though Romney wasn't their dreamboat candidate.
Gus Marvinson: What this tells me is that we "unsophisticated" folks (thoughI did vote) didn't see a substantial difference between the two tickets, no matter how much the pundit class and GOP talking heads tried to convince us there was one. Give us a real conservative with a record of getting things done and we will vote for him. In droves.
We may be unsophisticated, but we aren't stupid. · 1 hour ago
Oct '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Keep in mind how much things have changed since Reagan's days. I'm not making excuses for people not taking time to understand actual arguments and concepts, but maybe they have actual evidence that voters tune out everything after the first couple of sentences, and the only way to get through to them is with very short sentences with easy words.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
He says that the Mormon issue clearly isn't a problem, because Mitt didn't do worst in the Deep South. The Deep South doesn't produce all that much anti-Mormon literature, though. If you go to Iowa you see the surplus evangelical vote for this year was roughly evenly split, on top of McCain's base 2-1 advantage.
If you go to Colorado, which was the center for the Huckabee supporting anti-LDS campaign in 2008, we get an amazingly powerful result. We go from Obama getting 23% of the white evangelical vote in 2008, which represented 21% of the electorate, to 47% of the white evangelical vote, which represented 56% of the electorate.
Obama got 50k fewer votes in Colorado than in 2008, and Mitt got 52k more votes. Mitt had about an 80% increase in white evangelical voting, Obama had about an 450% increase in his white evangelical vote.
Every state has its own story. Trende essentially argues here that Ohio was won by Obama's superior advertizing budget. Colorado was won by the massive turnout of white evangelicals for Obama. I'm genuinely curious about a non-religious basis for this. Mollie?