Why Did Mitt Romney Lose The 2012 Presidential Election?

[Teddy B 17,252]

The Republican party really needs to take a look at itself if it plans on winning a national election anytime soon. They are a hard party to get behind, whether people like it or not. They are, fairly or unfairly, seen as too extreme for a lot of people to grasp onto. There is a reason the younger generation is flocking to the Democrats - and the majority of that reason is social issues. When you have a party that can't keep its members from coming out and saying offensive things about homosexuals, women, rape, abortion, etc ... who wants to follow them?

Even Newt Gingrich said the nation showed that his party was completely off base and needed to be really looked at from within. Romney was a poor candidate to begin with, but I'm not sure any Republican candidate would have won. Not with the way the GOP presents itself.

Their country is changing, but they refuse to.

Hopefully this defeat will open the door for the Libertarian Party, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I have said before that the core of the current Republiucan party is full of religious busy bodies, mainstream America wants nothing to do with that anymore.

[Penny Lane 8,159]

You can say social issues don't matter, but the reality is that they do. They might not matter to you, but they're "easy" issues that everyone has an opinion on and are simple for people to either agree or disagree with. To some, the economy is complicated and you can throw a bunch of numbers at them, but at the end of the day, they aren't sure what to believe. People generally know how they feel about things like gay marriage or abortion.

And again, you can say women's issues are a joke but that doesn't make it true. According to CNN, Obama had the lead with women voters - 55% to 44% for Romney. You can scoff, say those issues don't matter, say they're fabricated, whatever. But women are far more likely to vote for the guy they trust when it comes to decisions that will directly impact them.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

mainstream America wants nothing to do with that anymore.

Y'all would know mainstream America if you were standing in it.

[^_^ 5,021]

It worked for Obama. His whole campaign was, "I am not as bad as those guys."

The democratic coalition is bigger than the republican coalition. When you have a smaller coalition, you need to make new friends.

[JohnR! 5,495]

Hopefully this defeat will open the door for the Libertarian Party, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I have said before that the core of the current Republiucan party is full of religious busy bodies, mainstream America wants nothing to do with that anymore.

No sane American wants to be associated with the likes of Palin, Bachman, Mourdock, Akin and the exotic fauna that graces the galleries of the GOP anymore...

[Obama 2012 1,714]

You can say social issues don't matter, but the reality is that they do. They might not matter to you, but they're "easy" issues that everyone has an opinion on and are simple for people to either agree or disagree with. To some, the economy is complicated and you can throw a bunch of numbers at them, but at the end of the day, they aren't sure what to believe. People generally know how they feel about things like gay marriage or abortion.

And again, you can say women's issues are a joke but that doesn't make it true. According to CNN, Obama had the lead with women voters - 55% to 44% for Romney. You can scoff, say those issues don't matter, say they're fabricated, whatever. But women are far more likely to vote for the guy they trust when it comes to decisions that will directly impact them.

We can all create issues, throw a spokesperson behing it and claim for it to be big.

We're a reactionist nation. If we see something bad happen and it makes national news, we make a law to change it eventhough 99.9% of the population isn't effected by the situation.

Hell, you can barely sneeze these days without someone yelling "get you fvcking flu shot."

[^_^ 5,021]

Hell, you can barely sneeze these days without someone yelling "get you fvcking flu shot."

really? sounds like you're surrounded by weirdos. i've never heard that.

[JohnR! 5,495]

We're a reactionist nation.

I believe that to be a trait of your particular location. Consider moving somewhere closer to 2012....

[Teddy B 17,252]

[quote name=' timestamp='1352318444' post='5808040]

really? sounds like you're surrounded by weirdos. i've never heard that.

He's being a reactionist.

[mjamhuri 0]

Mitt Romney lost the elections because of his and his party's anti-immigrant rhetorics!!!! The minority xenophobes a.k.a tea parties have all along propelled this message of "browning" America, and this pissed off all the sober minded folks who dont care about your origin,looks etc etc...Unless the GOP'iers change their tune, and accept the fact this is now a very diversified nation of immigrants, better they shop for a good hammock coz theyll be in for very long vacations!!

Amidst claims of external influences, divine intervention, voo-doo practices and other excuses, it seems there is a rational and acceptable explanation to the results of the 2012 Presidential elections in the USA.

source: http://www.forbes.co...ntial-election/

Why Did Mitt Romney Lose The 2012 Presidential Election?

America is not especially far right of center, is getting less white, and is slowly, but surely, digging out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. The public, most specifically in the "battleground states," but most probably overall (by a slightly smaller margin than the re-election of George W. Bush), decided to stick with the president for another term.

Whites were 76.3% of the voters in 2008; early exit polls have it falling to 72% in 2012. Among them, 61% of men and 55% of women voted for Mitt Romney. President Obama won Latinos, African-Americans, and "all others" by larger margins than Romney won among even white men. (The lowest was Latino men, who chose the president 63-35.)

I allude to this trend in my current Forbes post (Congrats On Your Vote, Too Bad It Probably Didn't Count – Forbes (onforb.es)), but this is "demographic determinism." The Republican Party is about tight borders, "self-deportation" of illegal aliens, restrictions on voting rights, and a number of other things that are killing it among minority voters. Romney did nothing to help in this matter. He's rich. He's "very white," having come from Utah, being Mormon, being a country-club businessman, etc. Let me be clear, I believe he's a good man and has achieved many great things, but I am describing how this race was run — and lost.

Before the first debate in Denver, candidate Romney had shifted right to win the Republican primaries. He was a "severe conservative," moving his positions on abortion, immigration, climate change, etc. to suit the more conservative primary electorate. When the Denver debate started, Romney came out with a defense of regulation — after the GOP spent four years blaming Obama for wrecking the economy with too many of those.

And the candidate whose advisers said could take an Etch-a-Sketch after the primaries did just that. Suddenly, "Moderate Mitt" re-emerged. Not quite the man who governed Massachusetts, but someone much closer than we'd seen. Someone who — I believe — might have lost the primaries to Rick Santorum (the last conservative standing), but had he been able to campaign that way for a year, might have won the election.

Instead, we got another Massachusetts candidate who could rightly be called a "flip flopper" (and one arguably far more flippy than the last guy). "Romnesia" as a meme didn't decide this election, but the concept stuck, in part due to its legitimacy.

And finally, while it wasn't just Gov. Romney with the affliction of forgetting, the Republicans tried to convince America to forget how we got in this economic mess in the first place. The voters by a reasonable majority blamed President Bush's policies and administration. They looked past a top-line 7.9% unemployment rate and saw the 5+ million jobs created since the bottom of the trough as evidence of an improving economy.

Economic growth is real, even if too slow for anyone's satisfaction. And while Romney promised to create "12 million new jobs," a supposedly unsophisticated electorate somehow intuited that was basically what's expected without much good happening. (Source: Fact Check: Romney's '12 million jobs' promise (washingtonpost.com)). Read this over at Slate if you have a moment: Whoever Wins the Election Will Get To Preside Over a Growing Economy and Look Like a Genius (slate.com). Excerpt here:

Consider that over the course of George W. Bush's eight years in office, net employment

increased by about a million jobs while we've added a bit more than half a million (washingtonpost.com)

in Obama's first term. By historical standards, that's abysmal. More than 11 million jobs were added in

each

of

Bill Clinton

's two terms in office….

There's no reason to think 2013-2016 will see the kind of super-fast growth we saw in the late-1930s or mid-1980s, but it's overwhelmingly likely that the next four or five years

will

look a lot better than the past four or five. That means whoever wins the election is likely to get a similar halo,

The American people trust Obama to more or less stay the course and didn't believe Romney was going to do much better. Again, this is nothing to crow about, unless, of course, you want to compare us to the UK. Our financial crisis on balance was much worse, yet our recovery has been much less horrendous. Compare us to the Brits for example:

Note that these curves are both below a "normal recovery," which is consistent with much research that shows unwinding from a financial crisis/de-leveraging recession is harder than average. In the U.S., the slope of the curve is very nearly "normal." In the UK, the slope of the curve is disastrous. Generally, I love the English, but thank goodness we did it differently from them.

[^_^ 5,021]

Mitt Romney lost the elections because of his and his party's anti-immigrant rhetorics!!!! The minority xenophobes a.k.a tea parties have all along propelled this message of "browning" America, and this pissed off all the sober minded folks who dont care about your origin,looks etc etc...Unless the GOP'iers change their tune, and accept the fact this is now a very diversified nation of immigrants, better they shop for a good hammock coz theyll be in for very long vacations!!

I see.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

[quote name=' timestamp='1352318048' post='5808016]

The democratic coalition is bigger than the republican coalition. When you have a smaller coalition, you need to make new friends.

How do you figure? Look at the number of Governors, the number of Representatives in Congress, and the various state legislatures.

Edited November 7, 2012 by The Patriot

[^_^ 5,021]

How do you figure?

because in a high turnout election, we won.

look, you can wallow in your own denial if you want. it dont matter to me. but the groups that make up our coalition are growing faster than the groups that make up yours. those are the facts.

how do you change it?

by chipping away at our groups.

i call it "making new friends".

step 1 to making new friends...

stop being a douchebag.

(not you, but generally speaking)

[Brother Hesekiel 2,236]

If someone wants to reel in the most people, he has to walk in the middle, the center. If you then throw out your net while swinging a 360, you'll get lucky.

Obama is too much corporatist, to conservative, for the liberals, and is pretty much a likable Republican.

In contrast, Romney, the supposed Republican, has alienated everyone except the super rich, the white trailer trash, and the bible clinging folks. It's not possible to become the President of a country with those people alone.

I am a liberal, don't belong to any party. In fact, I am rather conservative on some issues.

I don't need gays' rights to marry for my happiness, I'm against the DREAM Act as it is written now (16-30), and as a male I could care less about abortions, gun rights and such stuff.

But if you tell me that I cannot get affordable health care that you yourself have created for your own state, that you want to take away my Medicare retirement fund and turn it into a voucher system for the private corporations, and that you will appoint one or more right wing judges that will try to take everything away we have gained in the past 50 years in terms of public liberties, then you can't get my vote. Worst, if I perceive you as a liar without a backbone who would say anything and do everything to fulfill your personal wet dream, you really can't get my vote.

[Teddy B 17,252]

[quote name=' timestamp='1352318857' post='5808060]

because in a high turnout election, we won.

look, you can wallow in your own denial if you want. it dont matter to me. but the groups that make up our coalition are growing faster than the groups that make up yours. those are the facts.

how do you change it?

by chipping away at our groups.

i call it "making new friends".

step 1 to making new friends...

stop being a douchebag.

(not you, but generally speaking)