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Thursday, November 8, 2012, 9:41 PM

So I’ll be fast.

1. Maybe there aren’t as many missing voters as Sean Trende thinks. Figuring where Romney underperformed with whites (not his biggest problem), will have to wait until more of the votes are counted. According to the exit polls Romney won white voters by 59% to 39% for Obama. By way of comparison, McCain won whites by 55% to 43%. By way of further comparison, the last winning Republican presidential candidate won whites by 58% to 41%. The white voters who actually showed up were the most Republican-leaning of any group of white voters since 1988. Romney did worse than McCain among Latinos and Asians despite running in a much more favorable political environment.

2. Contra John Yoo, Romney will likely surpass McCain total popular vote when all the ballots are counted and do so by more than a million votes. Romney did not get fewer total votes. He got more votes. They just haven’t all been counted yet.

3. I’m not primarily worried about the superior technical expertise of the Democrats going forward. At least there is a model for Republicans to copy. How Republicans win over growing constituencies while keeping their limited government commitments is going to be harder. There are models there too (look at Reagan in the 1960s), but the applications are more general than specific.

4 Comments

    What! Again? » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog
    November 9th, 2012 | 7:12 am

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    Joe Knippenberg
    November 9th, 2012 | 8:57 am

    I’ll bet that when you’re not tired and rushed and you look closely at the exit polling data, you’ll notice that what skewed the Latino voe more in Obama’s direction is the Latino women’s vote. The men voted the way Latinos vote in an average (not good) Republican year, but Latino women tilted roughly 10% more in Obama’s direction.

    Indeed, all of Obama’s success among women can be traced to his success among non-white women, who are (I suspect) disproportionately unmarried.

    Pete Spiliakos
    November 9th, 2012 | 6:20 pm

    Joe, you’re absolutely right about the gender breakdown of Latino votes, but I don’t think it goes very far to explain how the Republican voted declined among Asian Americans. Reihan Salam has some ideas over at his place. http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/333087/brief-thoughts-artur-davis-and-grand-gop-rethink-reihan-salam

    Mike Schilling
    November 17th, 2012 | 3:20 am

    Yoo’s logic is, as you’d expect, tortured.


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