Election recap

I really haven't been all that political since moving over here to Blogger, but since we just finished off a presidential election, maybe now is as good a time as any to jump back into the fray.  So what exactly happened this past week, and for that matter the months leading up to it?  Well, let's take a look back and see.  perhaps you will agree with my assessment, perhaps not, but you are always welcome to agree or disagree in the comments section.


So why did Mitt Romney lose and or Barack Obama win?  I mentioned on a Facebook link from my friend and media personality Jerry Bowyer (I produced his radio show for four years) that what struck me first and foremost was that this election was much like the 2004 race between George Bush and John Kerry, but in reverse.  This time around you had a vulnerable Democratic incumbent but the opposition party put up a candidate that came across as elitist.  Far too often Republicans were not asking you to vote for someone (Romney) but simply asking you to vote against someone (Obama) without telling you really just what it was that you were voting for and why it was better.  If I am making dinner and I could have brussel sprouts as my vegetable, but it turns out I don't like brussel sprouts, that does not automatically mean I am going to have corn instead, I may opt to not have a vegetable at all.  Likewise, just because I might not like Obama, that is not a guarantee that I am going to rush out and vote for Romney.  In part that was the case here, voter turnout was down, people just opted to not have a vegetable.  It wasn't a matter of either/or, but rather neither/nor.

Next would be the question of whether or not the nation is on the right path.  The economy played a huge role for those that did vote, and I think we can all agree that the economy is far from being in great shape.  That being said, there were some outliers that suggest that it may be getting better.  Over the first four years under Obama's stewardship unemployment was at 7.8%, most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has it at 7.9% after peaking at 10.0% during Obama's first term.  During this same time frame unemployment in Europe, which is suffering from many of the same economic problems as the United States, rose 4%.  But to counter what has taken place during the first Obama term, the Republicans put forth a nominee who made money at Bain Capital, often times by laying people off and sometimes leaving a wake of destruction in their path to the tune of bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers.  It created the image, not unlike John Kerry's image in 2004, that Romney was out of touch with average Americans and what they are going through.  Exit polling done on Tuesday showed that people believed Obama understood their problems and what they were going through by an astounding 81%-19% margin.
 
It did not serve the Romney campaign that in many regards they operated in a bubble, at least as far as bad news was concerned.  When polling information was released that showed Obama leading, it was often derided as just propaganda of the main stream liberal media.  Let's get something straight, polling is not an exact science, sometimes polling organizations do get things wrong, but at the end of the day if a polling organization continually gets things wrong, then they will find themselves out of work, or at least out of credibility.  Who would subscribe to any sort of polling where the odds were simply a coin flip as to whether the polling was accurate or not?  But rarely if ever, when bad polling numbers were released, did Republicans ask the simple question of whether the poll was accurate and if it was what can we be doing better?  Instead they fell into an echo chamber of sorts, surrounding themselves with like minded individuals who would mouth the things that the party wanted to hear.   This was no more evident than on election night when Karl Rove sat on the set of Fox News and questioned why Fox was calling Ohio for Obama, thereby sewing up Obama's win.  Rather that treat Rove for what he was, a biased source who was behind Crossroads GPS, an organization that spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get conservatives elected all over the country, Fox News sent one of their own (Meghan Kelly) off the set to go into the Fox News polling room and question their very own employees if they had gotten their numbers right.  Facts be damned, it was far better to cater to the whims of a conservative on set than to treat him like the fool he was made out to be.

There is also the growing minority issue, minorities are taking up larger portions of the electorate and winning them over is something that both parties have to think long and hard about.  Some would suggest that this is simply a Republican problem, but I wouldn't be too sure about that.  Those in the conservative movement need to recognize that many of the people that come here do not do so out of some desire to get free things from a welfare state, but rather they come here to embrace the American dream, that by working hard there is always the possibility of upward mobility, moreso here than in their countries of origin.  Likewise Democrats will need to guard themselves from that wing of their party that assumes that minorities are simply coming here taking union jobs.  Both poles, the welfare staters and the job stealers, have one thing in common, that being a "closed border, ship them all out approach" to immigration.  In this cycle (and in 2008), Republicans were harder on immigration than Democrats and it helped Democrats to win that constituency, but come 2016 when neither party has an incumbent and both parties are determining who will be their prospective nominee in primary elections, the issue of immigration will most certainly come up again and the side that sees their message dictated by those who are most intolerant on immigration will pay for it at the voting booth.  Florida is one state that is already up for grabs on the immigration issue, and growing minority populations in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas could see those states up for grabs in the very near future as well.

Anyway, those are a few things I took out of this particular election, perhaps you took other things out that I did not mention, or perhaps you disagree with my assessment, but that is what is cool about this blog, you are free to do so, I will not hold it against you (unless you are one of those Birthers, who still clings to the hope Obama is a closet Muslim), reasonable discussion and debate is more than welcome, even if I doubt much will be forthcoming.