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).
- Comment (62)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (5)
Comments:
Oct '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
No one thought Mitt could prompt a record GOP turnout.
It was Obama, 15% real unemployment, 23 million on food stamps, $16 trillion debt, trillion dollar deficits, foreign policy failures, national security debacles, Obamacare, ad nauseam that was supposed to do the trick. It did it in 2010, after all. Why not in 2012 is still anyone's guess.
Jun '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Making any broad statement about the election based on this piece from Sean Trende is problematic. Extrapolating sketchy data about Southeastern Ohio into an emphatic statement that rural whites didn't vote seems extremely premature.
I would point out that Southeast Ohio is really part of Appalachia. It's mostly foothill country with poor farming and a small fraction of the population of the state. There are few employers outside of government jobs, healthcare, and Ohio University. Rural Ohio outside of SE Ohio is rich farmland, small towns with light manufacturing and quick access to the bigger population centers.
While this piece is an interesting take off point for some discussion I would rather wait for the vote totals to get near 100% before I start deciding who voted and who didn't.
I know this much-- I live in a rural county with a total population under 230,000. The county is 20% black and 77% white. Turnout was 58% of eligible voters.
Romney won 59.5% / Obama 39% / others took 1.5%.
Republican turnout was up 8.5% and Democrats were up 2.2%
But, our rural county is a good bit wealthier than Southeastern Ohio.
Oct '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
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
Oh, you'll see a substantial difference in the tickets when Obama nominates 3 Supreme Court justices and the Senate confirms them. Of course by then it'll be too late for the unsophisticates to vote.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
dittoheadadt
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
Oh, you'll see a substantial difference in the tickets when Obama nominates 3 Supreme Court justices and the Senate confirms them. Of course by then it'll be too late for the unsophisticates to vote. · 25 minutes ago
The CBO reckoned that in fifteen years time under the Ryan Plan, which was slightly less radical than Mitt's proposals, but essentially similar, we'd have a substantial surplus. In fifteen years time under Obama, the CBO, with the same assumptions, reckoned we'd have the federal government go bankrupt. I guess you''d have to be pretty darn sophisticated to see a difference between those two outcomes.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
James Of England
dittoheadadt
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
Oh, you'll see a substantial difference in the tickets when Obama nominates 3 Supreme Court justices and the Senate confirms them. Of course by then it'll be too late for the unsophisticates to vote. · 25 minutes ago
The CBO reckoned that in fifteen years time under the Ryan Plan, which was slightly less radical than Mitt's proposals, but essentially similar, we'd have a substantial surplus. In fifteen years time under Obama, the CBO, with the same assumptions, reckoned we'd have the federal government go bankrupt. I guess you''d have to be pretty darn sophisticated to see a difference between those two outcomes. · 0 minutes ago
Yeah, but James, which of the plans gives me free contraceptives?
Oct '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
James Of England
dittoheadadt
Gus Marvinson: What this tells me is that we
We may be unsophisticated, but we aren't stupid. · 1 hour ago
The CBO reckoned that in fifteen years time under the Ryan Plan, which was slightly less radical than Mitt's proposals, but essentially similar, we'd have a substantial surplus. In fifteen years time under Obama, the CBO, with the same assumptions, reckoned we'd have the federal government go bankrupt. I guess you''d have to be pretty darn sophisticated to see a difference between those two outcomes. · 3 minutes ago
The entire country going bankrupt is a very small price to pay for not undergoing the indignity of voting for a candidate that isn't 100% up to your standards on every single issue.
Romney won the nomination, and while he was few people's first choice, he was essentially the compromise candidate for the Republicans. Some Republicans decided to take their ball and stay home, and thus Obama became the compromise Republican candidate.
Good game.
Sep '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
James Of England: 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.
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? · 53 minutes ago
James, Byron York and the WSJ have the reason here. We never stood a chance.
May '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
I feared this result in the primaries, which is why I pushed for Perry in the end after everyone else had abandoned him due to his debate slip ups. Not that Perry necessarily would have won either, but it didn't take much insider information to tell that Romney was going to have trouble appealing to rural and blue collar whites.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Pseudodionysius
James Of England: 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.
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? · 53 minutes ago
James, Byron York and the WSJ have the reason here. We never stood a chance. · 10 minutes ago
Both victory and defeat have a thousand fathers when the contest is complex. I fully agree that King of Bain and, to a lesser extent, the early Obama spending successfully transformed Bain from a major asset to a major problem, and that this represented more of a difference than the margin of victory.
It didn't mean that we were doomed, though; a lot of other stuff happened.
Jun '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Hope she runs in 2016. I've soured on her, but I'll give her another shot if she gets back in the arena.
Mar '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Hey, I agree that rural voters should have gone to the polls, but this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Conservative country folk (primarily social conservatives like myself) aren't going to cast their ballots for moderates. They've been like that for election cycle after election cycle and the Grand Poobahs in the GOP keep trying to force-feed milquetoast candidates down their gullets thinking that they will finally give in. They won't.
Like I said, this isn't new. It's about time GOP leadership caught on.
Mar '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
This result is exactly why many of us warned against Mitt in the primaries. We saw this coming. Losing elections is not the fault of those who don't vote, it is the fault of the losing candidate who failed to inspire voters.
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 10:29pmNov '12
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
And now some details about why the Romney GOTV effort failed come out. Read that link and weep. Good Lord, what goat rodeo. In some sense this points to Romney deserving to lose.
Edited on November 8, 2012 at 10:40pmAug '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
That's a curious critique, because during the debates we all got fed up with the little anecdotes both candidates were using. They felt forced, and insulting, and deviated from the larger data points we all wanted them to use. Remember the "who can tell the most stories about meeting soldiers" counts, and "I visited foreign country X recently!" stories from the 2nd debate?
There was excess sloganeering going on, but we got plenty of anecdotes too, and they weren't helpful. Maybe the candidates just weren't using them correctly. Maybe they were sound bites to show that the liberal intellectual elite in his 4 year DC bubble, and the rich businessman from an offbeat religion, were actually "one of the people".
Aug '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Thom, I know it sounds like a post hoc claim of prescience, but this was my secret fear in the 3 months leading up to the election: that the Romney campaign was not getting some campaign fundamentals correct.
We never heard about the wondrous GOP GOTV machine. We never heard inside baseball stories about how the campaign was organized like an efficient business unit. We didn't get paranoid stories about secretive, super-smart tactics or marketing campaigns.
We heard them from the Democratic camp, sometimes, but never from the bright business guys in Boston. It was almost as if they assumed the mechanics would take care of themselves if the message was right... a tempting idea, but a bad one.
Feb '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
In North Carolina, there were 112k more votes for Romney than McCain. Obama's raw vote count increased by 13k. There were 17 counties (of 100) where Romney had fewer votes than McCain -- 16 rural, 1 urban. But when you total the decrease it is slightly less than 5k votes. There were 68 counties where Obama's vote totals decreased relative to 2008 with the total being 39k. Almost all of these counties were rural.
So in North Carolina, Romney's vote total increased statewide compared to McCain's, the rural areas had increased turnout in total; and the few counties where Romney's vote total decreased, it was a small total decrease.
So Trende's analysis does not hold for this swing state -- which may explain why it was the one swing state to go for Romney.
Jul '10
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Seven rural counties in WI:
Those were the only counties I checked. McCain lost five of the seven, while Mitt won five.
For 2012 numbers.
For 2008 numbers.
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Trende's analysis is about Ohio. It's probably true of Ohio that a year's worth of continual class war advertizing was effective at reducing the rural vote. Colorado was lost by an unbelievably large increase in the Obama voting white evangelical community. In every state, it's a thousand factors, most of them invisible to the media.
We won't find a single cause, and Trende does himself no favours by taking a few Ohio counties and extrapolating nationwide, but it's a good analysis of a phenomenon in Ohio that is sufficiently large to account for the victory margin in Ohio. There are other factors, some as large as the victory margin, pointing in both directions, but Trende points to one of them in a useful and insightful piece (other than the suggestion that it's national; this combination of a thoughtful insight with a collection of mistaken assumptions about unstudied things is why he was consistently wrong about the primaries).
Apr '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Thom Williams: And now some details about why the Romney GOTV effort failed come out. Read that link and weep. Good Lord, what goat rodeo. In some sense this points to Romney deserving to lose. · 1 hour ago
Edited 1 hour ago
Orca was essentially an election day call optimizing plan that crashed. The author of that piece got himself in a terrible bother on the day, as I'm sure did maybe a few hundred other volunteers. Most of the 34k folks who were meant to be sending results to it will have done perfectly good poll watching without it. It's a shame that it went down, but it's not likely to have been responsible for more than a few hundred, maybe a thousand votes nationwide, not enough to swing a single state.
Not spending much on it meant that there would be risks of it collapsing. Gold plating it would have been an obvious waste. It worked out badly, but it's not a serious concern. I am, however, sorry that that John had a bad day.
Nov '11
Re: Rural Whites Didn't Show Up
Might be some defect in the numbers?
Might it be that rural whites really did show up at the polls, but not in the exit polls, because the pollsters didn't bother to drive to Tulia, Texas?
Obviously there are some "missing" white voters, but are we sure rural white voters really are the ones who are missing?
Just wondering.
Edited on November 9, 2012 at 5:21am