And what is your proposal?

Mr. Knippenberg recommended that you read Sean Trende’s Real Clear Politics. Let me summarize his theory. Trende focused on Ohio and compared 2008 turnout vs. 2012 turnout county by county. He found that the GOP counties that are rural and less economically prospering actually turned out less than in 2008 vs. the more affluent GOP counties in which turnout soared. His conclusion is that Obama’s attempts to make Romney appear out of touch, patrician, and concerned only for the rich paid off. Those voters would not vote for Obama, but were convinced to sit home rather than voting for Romney.

In 2004, the GOP took Bush’s win as evidence of a paradigm shift, that the country’s electorate had been realigned. Sound familiar? How long did that realignment last? Not even to the next midterm election in 2006. Obama’s tactics were focused on Mitt Romney, not the GOP as a whole.

I agree with Mr. Knippenberg that the GOP has some strategic decisions to make regarding both policy and messaging. I recommend that you read Yuval Levin’s excellent suggestions as to how the GOP can use conservative principles to make policy proposals that could make it more palatable to middle class and female voters. And while there are problems within the Latino community that are inhibiting it’s upward mobility and making it more dependent on government support, they are not (yet) intractable. However, Latino’s will not even listen to GOP ideas because our rhetoric makes them believe that we feel they don’t belong here. We MUST change our tone regarding Latinos AND propose policies that can solve the illegal immigration problem and still uphold the rule of law and promote assimilation.

Unfortunately I think we all are going to have a “wake up call” in the future due to irresponsible debt, divisive identity politics and the success of demonization campaigning that this President has raised to a new level.

I am sure the people of the northeast feel doubly blessed to have received the storm and also been given the tremendous opportunity to be a wake up call for the Republican Party.

George W. Bush’s White House was certainly filled with very talented women and persons of color.

The Republicans need to do a better job nationally of putting forward prominent women and persons of color. Would it have helped Romney to have Condoleezza Rice or Marco Rubio as a VP candidate?

Please read the first post I wrote, to which I link in this one. The exit polling data do seem to indicate a shift in the demographic composition of the electorate, though I think that Sean Trende’s analysis ought to give us some cause for pause.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/11/08/the_case_of_the_missing_white_voters_116106.html

Also, if you read the exit polls carefully, you’ll notice something else: in addition to winning votes from people like me (middle-aged white men), Romney got a majority of the votes of white women and white young people. Obama’s overall lead among young people and women says more about the racial and ethnic composition of those slices of the population than it says simply about young people or women.

I’m not reluctant to face facts; rather I’m looking carefully at the facts I currently have available. Even if, as Trende argues, the larger non-white share of this electorate is largely the result of white non-voting, that doesn’t mean that–long term–it makes sense for Republicans and conservatives to write off a portion of the electorate that amounts to at least a quarter and will likely be larger in the future. It also doesn’t mean that they should engage in a bidding war for their loyalties with Democrats. it does mean that they have work to do, work that will be made harder by an opposition that controls the White House and the Senate and a media that is only too willing to give the current occupant of the Oval Office a free pass (vide: Benghazi).

By dividing the electorate into interest groups and finding ways to buy their votes through acts that appeared to demonstrate compassion, he made himself seem compassionate and caring in the eyes of the electorate. It was shrewd, it was smart, and it won him the election.