I know it\u2019s painful, but let\u2019s take a look \u2013 for me a last look \u2013 at what happened and didn\u2019t happen in the election:<\/p>\n
Mandate?<\/strong>\u00a0Who got a mandate? \u00a0The president? \u00a0His popular vote was nearly a 50-50 break with Governor Romney. \u00a0Congressional Democrats? \u00a0Yes, they won the Senate. \u00a0But the Republicans won the House, as well as now having thirty-one governorships. \u00a0My point? \u00a0In this election the American people ended up looking a lot like a boss who calls in two squabbling subordinates, hears them out and then tells them to spare him (or her) the details, work out their differences and get the job done. \u00a0The mandate isn\u2019t for one policy or another. \u00a0It is for both sides to grow up and fix the nation\u2019s spending, taxing and economic troubles.<\/p>\n Power of the Permanent Campaign?<\/strong>\u00a0I don\u2019t know. \u00a0In Ohio the Obama people never dismantled their 2008 apparatus. \u00a0In Chicago they spent four years assembling what reports suggest was a truly formidable data mining and management operation, with dazzlingly sophisticated targeting and messaging capacities. \u00a0What did it get them? \u00a0The president won with 6.8 million fewer voted than last time. \u00a0All those years of effort for that?<\/p>\n Inept Romney Operation?<\/strong>\u00a0Let\u2019s agree that there was a lot to shake your head at in the way Team Romney ran their race, much of it evident only after the voting. \u00a0I don\u2019t know anyone who believes you can develop a complex software program like the now-infamous ORCA get-out-the-vote package and expect it to work first time out. \u00a0But apparently that was the expectation of the wizards of Boston. \u00a0And when have you heard of a major presidential campaign producing invalid polls? \u00a0Actually, those two day-after tidbits \u2013 the software and the polling — leave me speechless. \u00a0I have no way to make sense of them. \u00a0We\u2019re not talking Campaign 101 here, more like Campaign Pre-School. \u00a0And yet. \u00a0And yet. \u00a0They came within inches of winning at least the popular vote. \u00a0So you pit what was perhaps the most technically formidable presidential campaign on record with what sounds like the Keystone Kops, and the Kops almost win. \u00a0How do you make sense of that?<\/p>\n The Big Clue:<\/strong>\u00a0For me, the big clue to this election was not the apparent surge of minority voters or youth voters. And it was not the gender gap. Don\u2019t get me wrong. \u00a0Clearly the Hispanic and Asian voters, in particular, need more attention from the GOP. \u00a0But the real mystery and, I believe, the key to everything that happened on Election Day, was the voter who didn\u2019t vote, 7.6 million of them in all when you add the (negative) difference between Romney\u2019s total and McCain\u2019s to the president\u2019s drop off. \u00a0\u00a0Some of this ghost vote went to third parties, whose combined total jumped about a third from 2008. \u00a0But that still leaves around seven million absent and unaccounted for, more if you consider the population increase.<\/p>\n Why did they stay home?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s my guess. \u00a0In 2005, pollsters started seeing a sector of the 2004 Bush vote breaking away from the GOP over spending and deficits. \u00a0Think of it as the Perot types a decade after Perot\u2019s eccentric but devastating (for Mr. Bush\u2019s father) run. \u00a0My guess is that the most vocal and active segments of this group later became the Tea Party, though many of the others found the Tea Party itself off-putting. \u00a0But in 2006 and 2008 much of this group (vocal or not) voted for the Democrats, if only to teach the Republicans a lesson. \u00a0Then came 2009 and the current president\u2019s string of shock and awe trillion-dollar bailouts and deficits, pushing the New Perots back to the GOP in 2010.<\/p>\n But here was Governor Romney\u2019s problem. \u00a0This swing vote still distrusted Republicans, particularly anyone they saw a moderate Republican, meaning to them moderate about fixing the nation\u2019s fiscal problems (which they saw as indistinguishable from its economic problems). \u00a0Several times through the primaries, pollsters split GOP primary voters between sympathetic-to-the-Tea Party and neutral-to-anti Tea Party. \u00a0It turned out to be pretty much a 50-50 division. \u00a0Romney consistently won the neutrals and antis. \u00a0All the swinging from candidate to candidate we saw in that period was in the pro-Tea Party segment.<\/p>\n Now it is true that by Election Day two weeks ago everyone with a strong institutional attachment to the GOP had lined up solidly and enthusiastically behind Romney. \u00a0But my guess is that there were millions of others \u2013 maybe as many as seven million \u2013 who shared the Tea Party views about spending, deficits and debt but didn\u2019t care much for the GOP itself and weren\u2019t sold. \u00a0They remembered Romney\u2019s reputation for flip-flopping. \u00a0They were troubled that his themes came together with clarity very late, not until the first debate really. \u00a0So they never felt they could trust him to follow through in office, as, broadly, they felt they could trust Republicans in the House.<\/p>\n This is why they stayed home \u2013 or if they showed up at the polls, didn\u2019t cast a vote for president.<\/p>\n If I am right, winning back this sympathetic but distrustful group is the single biggest task for Republican candidates in the coming years. \u00a0That will mean standing firm \u2013 intelligently firm — on spending, deficits and debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know it\u2019s painful, but let\u2019s take a look \u2013 for me a last look \u2013 at what happened and didn\u2019t happen in the election: Mandate?\u00a0Who got a mandate? \u00a0The president? \u00a0His popular vote was nearly a 50-50 break with Governor Romney. \u00a0Congressional Democrats? \u00a0Yes, they won the Senate. \u00a0But the Republicans won the House, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[42,52,77,12],"class_list":["post-1435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicalcommentary-campaign-2012","tag-2012-election","tag-campaign","tag-election-2012","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}