The Boring General Election 2012 Thread

Just looking at the big numbers according Open Secrets, the amount of money for each team was quite close, with only roughly a 10% difference skewed toward Republicans. Plus in the presidential election, Obama raised and spent more than Romney by quite a lot and still in terms of election outcomes his popular vote victory was only a few percent. Yeah, I guess that outside funding is outside funding toward the presidential election?

I figure money acts like steroids in sports--again in terms of competition--it raises the cost of being competitive as more and more money gets dumped in.

<pauses to take a huge, huge, huge gulp of booze>

Rove is too shrewd to actually believe what he's saying, he's just getting an early start on reframing things for the 2014 elections.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The simplest explanation is that Rove is a very good campaign manager when it comes to pandering to white Southerners, but he has no idea what the hell he's doing outside of that context.

Exactly, he needs some kind of excuse to tell the people who payed him all that money.

Parsimony is great for science or when you're troubleshooting computer problems, but it's crap at assessing competitive opponents.

I think it's foolish to underestimate the intelligence of someone who has been so successful -- that the election was even close at all is something of a coup for the GOP considering their dwindling demographics and weak candidates.

It wasn't close.

His prior experience involved going on air and complaining about the networks prematurely calling Florida for Gore. Why change strategy now?

Sure, in hindsight, or due to our finicky electoral college mechanism. Check things a few weeks ago, or especially look at the popular vote, and yes it was close. Way closer than it should be based on the merits of the candidates.

The GOP really has things structurally stacked against it (e.g. if you look at polling on issues), they just benefit from a combination of smarter/stronger politics than the Democrats, stacked with the lingering small yet significant racist stigma against having a black president.

You're mixing a lot of things together there to get to your destination. The "finickiness" of the electoral college doesn't change that it's what decides elections, and it wasn't close. As was pointed out elsewhere, cartograms complicate the picture further if you're interested in a popular vote discussion.

That the election was closer than it should have been, sure. But it's unclear to what degree Rove style tactics were successful and to what degree they ultimately set a too-low upper limit with what Bill O'Reilly called a traditional white establishment ticket. It's really murky how the SuperPac math worked out, as well, and I think the parallel voter suppression campaign was a disaster for Republicans in terms of spurring Democratic counter-efforts.He had no answer to neutralize the effect that the GOP uterine rage contingent had on driving women towards Obama by a margin even wider than the last election.

I think Jason's dead on, and GOP analysts who no doubt got outranked by Roveites were saying months ago that this was the last time anyone would run on the white vote alone.

I don't know. I recall reading a week or two before the election projections that had Romney at 30-40% chance of winning, even via the electoral college. That doesn't strike me as a blowout.

Fivethirtyeight's probability charts, with date mouseovers, are all still up. Romney briefly cracked 40% on the "now-cast," but never did on the Nov. 6 forecast, even in the post-Denver steeplechase. Obama's recovery there was steady and (to me at any rate) perfectly convincing. The terror in the final stages was the 25-30% chance that wouldn't go away - partly due to Silver's conservative allowance for systematic error - not the fact that he was projecting Romney chances as high as 40%.

I didn't follow the Princeton one until the last minute.

In part I'm assuming that the chance for "systemic error" is actually pretty high, given how this country's election apparatus practically encourages it.

But ultimately I agree, it does seem like the GOPs base-playing anti-woman and anti-poor rants did come back and bite them in the ass. I especially liked the effort to get Democrats to register to vote by mail in Florida, thus heading off all sorts of shenanagins while at the same time boosting left wing turnout.

It would be such a relief if this were the last election where pandering to right wing white male vote was considered a winning strategy. Seems like that's too good to be true though!

The popular vote is trivia. Something that people often miss about it is that it isn't reflective of the results we'd have if we didn't have the electoral college. A lot of people look at the popular vote and go "it's pretty close" or in certain years "wow, so if we didn't have the electoral college, the other guy would've won," but that's not true; if we didn't have the electoral college, the entire race would have been run differently and it's impossible to say where it would have ended up. So you can't say that the election was a blowout due to our finicky electoral college mechanism, because that mechanism is the only context in which the election actually happens. It's impossible to say for sure, but I would bet that in the parallel universe where the US ditched the electoral college back in 2009, the popular vote showed a similar blowout in Obama's favor.

As for being able to say that the election wasn't close only in hindsight, well...

Silver went 49/50 in 2008 and 50/50 in 2012*.

He seems to know what he's doing.

(He was also 36/37 for governors in 2010 and within his CI for both the senate and house races in 2010.)

Thinking about this more, Bush 43 was somehow decent at appealling to Hispanics, Rove or not. I've never seen a very good overview of why, other than "speaks Spanish," "doesn't tolerate racism," "friends with lots of influential Texas Hispancis". Is that really all it takes?

Well, Romney couldn't manage any of that beyond lamenting how sad for him that he wasn't lucky enough to be born Latino in this country.

His policy stances on immigration were also a significant departure from those of his party. Remember, this is the guy that actually introduced a bill that would have offered amnesty and created a guest worker program. Congressional Republicans killed it, but still.

It really is all it takes. Republican racism is never more clear than when they try to discuss the motivations of non-white people. To them, it's all tribal politics, and so they assume it's all tribal politics for everyone else too. Hence, for example, the instantaneous right-wing dismissal of Colin Powell's Obama endorsement. So, since Jeb Bush speaks Spanish and married a latina, they expect he should receive their votes, as an honorary member of their tribe.

Yeah, and you sort of also danced around the main way in which both major parties but probably especially the Republicans are misunderstanding how they need to approach hispanic voters: they are not one group, they're a couple dozen groups, and they don't all share the same interests or attitudes and you sure don't automatically curry favor with all of them by currying favor with one. So while it's condescending to assume that people will vote for the guy who married one of their own, it's also fundamentally a misunderstanding of what "one of their own" even means in this context; Jeb Bush's wife is Mexican, which buys nothing among Cubans or Puerto Ricans or any other non-Mexican Hispanics, even the (probably pretty small number of) ones who might actually be swayed by the novelty of having "one of their own" represented in such a way.

There's just not a shortcut that will let them get all the Hispanics on their side via some pandering magic bullet. The only way to win over Hispanic voters by and large is to actually advance policies that benefit them. First party to really get that wins, but by default it's the Democrats since at least they're not actively hateful toward them all the time.

Funny thing is, there IS a shortcut to making all of them hate you. Complaining about having to "Press 1 for English" is a good start.

This is dead-on, and it's mindboggling to see prominent GOP figures straight-up admit to this mode of thinking, while not really seeing how offensive they appear to anyone that's not a closet xenophobe. Conservative fundster Richard Viguerie had this to say on the matter on NPR this morning:

It is hard to understate the size of the blind spot, here. I mean, listen to the bit--he's completely sincere. He honestly believes that the problem can't possibly be any part of the party's ideology or any of its policy stances, and that the key issue is simply making sure that they run enough token minorities. I mean, when he says that he wants to "change the face" of the Republican party, he is speaking quite literally. In his mind, the brown people will vote for brown people, and that is that.

Yeah, the Hatino community is just overflowing with love of weak government, a religious devotion to naive free-market principles, and obsessed about abortion.

By the way, the suggestion that Romney "ran away from" talking up traditional values and entrepreneurial spirit is flat-out hilarious. You could barely get him to shut up about that stuff.

And yet he didn't win the election. Therefore, he did not talk about PERFECT REPUBLICAN VALUES THAT ARE A BEACON OF LIGHT IN A DARK WORLD enough. Simple.

No true Scotsman effect.

The Republican Party can help themselves significantly with latinos by 2016 if they make an effort. They don't need to win over a majority. They just need to take a juicy bite out of the Democrats' gains. After this election loss I expect siphoning off latino votes to figure strongly in the GOP strategies for 2014 and 2016 and really they don't even need to do that much and the general population has a political memory that spans about...um, what?

What happens if Obama brings up immigration reform in the comming year and the Republicans compromise with him and pass something? Suddenly it just doesn't work anymore as a wedge issue and a sizable chunk of the latino demographic isn't going to care how fucked up the GOP's policy or rhetoric was in 2012. If they then run a spate of latino candidates in 2014 and 2016 it could go a long way to blunting the demographic advantage the Democrats expect to enjoy.

Yes, this would initially produce some groans from the existing base but overall I think they will soon start wanting to win more than they want to further militarize the border. Trying to have their cake and eat it too has led to two terms of a Kenyan muslim president, and afterall it's not like they'd be asking latinos to stop mowing their lawns.

Basically, this election's results don't change the fact that we're on a two-party pendulum and all Republicans have to do is be just a little less shitty to keep it swinging. It's amazing that they've let themselves go this long and this bad, but it wouldn't take a complete rehabilitation for them to slip another Dubya into office.

I am hoping like hell that the Democratic Party does more than count on GOP intransigence for the next couple elections.

Latino (and minority) opposition to the GOP isn't based on single issues. The GOP seems to think that if they just adopt a token Latino candidate, or change their stance on one issue, that'll get them what they need.

As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, go ahead and recall the Sotomayor confirmation. GOP opposition to Sotomayor was heavily racialized, and while most of the party didn't get down into the mud with the loonies, they didn't do anything to repudiate them either. Likewise nonsense about Sharia law, or whatever. There's a minority of the conservative movement who are rather bigoted, and the majority accepts and even embraces them. Until that changes, the GOP will continue to have issues with minorities.

Well put.

The majority of the electorate, minority or otherwise, does not put a lot of thought into political issues period. I still maintain that if the GOP can reframe their image as a friendlier party by the next election or two it will not matter how grotesque they've been in the past. Do they need to make substantive changes to succeed at repackaging themselves? I'm not sure but I have a cynical suspicion that a shave and a haircut just might work.

That was a good point but I think it's also just the kind of lesson GOP leadership may learn from this defeat. That kind of vitreol was only able to exist and persist in a vaccuum of leadership. They need to start leading their party before they will be able to lead the nation again. If they stop being passive about overt displays of racism or sexism they can probably tamp it back down to being something uttered in confidence after a quick scan around the room to make sure no makakas are present. The current base is nothing if not manipulable.

Also, I'd like to add that I'm not discounting the possibility that the GOP will just wildly miss the mark and fuck themselves over some more. I just hope the Democratic Party doesn't take that for granted. For the first five years of Bush's presidency the Dems basically rolled over rather than challenge and risk being called unpatriotic and we got thousands of dead, an elective war, erosion of civil rights, and an economy set on a course for self destruction. I'm not discounting the Democrats' ability to let their own passivity fuck us over.

Actually, Nate Silver was referring to systemic error in the ability of polls to predict voter attitudes. In other words, there are potential fundamental errors in the likely voter screen, in the selection of phone numbers that make up a sample, etc. I don't think he ever proposed a 15% chance that Romney would win due to miscounted, fradulent, or suppressed votes.

Aye, hence my use of quotes, and why I still think the election was closer than the numbers quoted above. People put entirely too much faith in 538, as our election system isn't as free of outside influence as it assumes.

Thanks ! Very entertaining. And she is so right - if people only would have shared her 15 posts and hundreds of videos with a bazillion views, shared them with people who did not want to see them, then money would have won.

That's sort of ridiculous, and I'm not sure what you mean by "faith" in 538. You think people saw Nate Silver's projections, and didn't do as much to make that happen? "Don't worry, Nate says it'll be all right." That's not my perspective at all. Silver's polling showed that the Democrats were winning on message. GOTV and stopping voter oppression are a different issue, and Silver's projections allowed Democrats to focus on those issues instead of (only) persuading undecideds.

If anything, Nate Silver did not have enough faith in the ability of pollsters to predict the actual outcome. He factored in a systemic error rate that was unnecessarily conservative.

I am loving this. Thanks for the share. How can anyone sustain that level of angry ranting for 24 minutes? Just yelling at your computer screen for that long seems to suggest some intense level of insanity.

I think you're all underestimating the chance for large scale electronic vote manipulation fraud, i.e. the sort of outside factor that 538 doesn't account for. You're putting much faith in 538's model being an accurate reflection of reality. You have to take into account both the model's statistical accuracy (seems solid to me), and the inherent accuracy of the model to begin with (which you can't accurately measure).

The US election infrastructure is one of the least protected ones outside the 3rd world, and frankly we're all relying upon everyone playing nice. I think the odds of the GOP affiliated companies running the vote machines not taking advantage of their position is less than 100%, with the effect of any fraud magnified due to our electoral college mechanics.

Because she is an ANGRY DRUNK. Although she isn't raging the entire time, she has a strange intermission where she tells us the history of one of her Facebook accounts. Give the woman a break!

I don't think it's people trusting the outcome of transparently verifiable statistical analysis with several large-scale examples of the soundness of the model that are prioritizing belief or faith over reality. You're advocating for some kind of nihilistic "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" view of GOP hyper-mendacity *and* effectiveness. There are plenty of provably significant problems to sweat without hypothetical ones.
If you have positive evidence, that's a different story.