Five Take-Ways From the 2012 Election

1. It was a National Wave ..

As of this moment, Barack Obama has defeated Mitt Romney by a popular vote margin of over three

million votes, 50.7% to 47.9%, a slightly greater margin than George Bush defeated John Kerry by in

2004. That margin should continue to grow as provisional ballots are counted across the country,

and the more than 3 million votes remaining in California are counted.

More impressive for Obama, and ominous for Republicans, are the electoral college numbers, and

Mitt Romney’s failure to make any real headway. In 2004, despite a popular margin of 2.4%, Bush

was dependent on a 118,000 vote margin in Ohio, 2.1%, to eke out a 286-252 victory in the electoral

college.

This year, Ohio scarcely mattered. Despite the focus on Ohio, an obsession that lasted well-into

election-night, even a Romney victory in Ohio would not have mattered. Obama had already won

the electoral college, and done so by more than his national margin in Wisconsin(6.7 points),

Nevada(6.6 points), Iowa(5.6 points) Colorado(4.7 points), Virginia(3 points). Those states alone

would provided Obama with a 291-247 lead in the electoral college. Even the loss of Virginia would

still have resulted in a narrow Obama victory, 278-260. Romney would have needed to somehow

have won Colorado, which he lost 51.2-46.5, in order to win the election.

In fact all of this was moot. In the end, the only state’s Mitt Romney gained were Indiana, which had

been conceded at the beginning of the year, and North Carolina which despite repeated claims that

it was “baked”, was decided by a 2% margin.

In the Senate, it was almost equally a clean sweep. Republican hopes for gains evaporated. Linda

McMahon, who had led for most of the summer, lost by 12 points in Connecticut, while other

Republican challengers, Linda Lingle in Hawaii, Connie Mack in Florida, and Josh Mandel in Florida

also fell short. Even in deep red North Dakota, nearly written off at the beginning of the year as an

automatic Republican pickup , Republican Congressman Rick Berg fell short. The only competitive

Senate races won by Republicans were in Nevada, where an exceptionally weak Democratic

candidate dogged by corruption allegations lost to Republican incumbent Dean Heller by a single

percentage point, and in Arizona, where late-counting should bring Richard Carmona within less

than three points.

2. But Gerrymandering Held…..

There seems to be a tendency among commentators, while simultaneously focusing on the

demographics behind Barak Obama’s victory and the difficulties they pose for the GOP going

forward, to claim that the election was nevertheless a split decision. After all, the Republicans

maintained control of the US House of Representatives, despite some of the lowest approval ratings

in history.

To accept this analysis is to miss what happened Tuesday night. Not only did Barack Obama win a

commanding majority in the Electoral College, but Democratic senate candidates swept almost

every competitive race, winning 25 out of 33 seats up for grabs, and only narrowly hold Arizona and

Nevada. Five of these victories occurred in states Mitt Romney won, two of them in states where his

margin of victory was over 20 points.

What saved the Republican House Majority was not any sort of split decision on the part of voters,

but rather their good fortune to have had their best year since 1920 in 2010, allowing them to

redraw congressional maps nationwide. In North Carolina, Democrats carried a majority of the

congressional vote, 2.22 million to 2.14 million, but Republicans won 9 seats to the Democrats 3,

with one Democratically-held seat going to a recount. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republicans

appear to have lost the popular vote as well, but won majorities of 9-5 and 13-5 respectively in

those delegations. Republicans won the popular vote in Ohio 53-47, but only because no votes were

included from an 83% Obama seat where the incumbent went unopposed. They won 12 out of 16

seats in the congressional delegation. In total, without winning the popular vote, Republicans

managed a 41-17.

Gerrymandering is of course not just a Republican sport. Democratic maps in Maryland and Illinois

resulted in 7-1 and 12-6 splits respectively, with latter involving a gain of four seats for Democrats

and a loss of five for the Republicans. And Democrats had a good night in California where a non-

partisan map replaced a bipartisan gerrymander. But the Republicans controlled far more

legislatures and in the end the House was not close. Nor, in fact, were many of the legislatures were

lines were drawn. Republicans increased their legislative majorities in Ohio, North Carolina, and

Wisconsin, and held on to lopsided margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

3. The House is Secure for the Decade, but that is a mixed blessing for the Republican Party

As noted earlier, the Republican Party’s triumph in its efforts to maintain control of the US House of

Representatives had more to do with favorable maps than the intent of the voters. With most of the

vote in, Democrats and Republicans are almost tied in votes cast, 55,962,439 for Democrats to

55,786,017 for the Republicans. Nonetheless, Republicans are likely to control 54% of the seats.

The Republican victory is if anything more complete, as their majority was never in particular doubt.

If the Republicans had lost every race where they took less than 52% of the vote, they would still

control the House by a 224-211 margin. By contrast if the Democrats lost every race where they

took less than 52%, the result would be a 248-187 Republican majority. In effect Democrats have

maxed out their number of likely targets outside of a major wave.

The very security of the Republican majority is not an unmitigated benefit. While securing

Republicans a seat at the table of the federal government for the next decade, the very fact that

Republicans can likely expect to hold the US House without majority support means that House

Republicans have very little incentive to attempt to reach out beyond the 47% or so of the vote they

need to maintain a majority. Whereas the Republican party as a whole is focused on winning over

young voters and Hispanics, the very concentration of these demographics in urban areas means

they play little role in the outcome of house elections even within the few swing districts that are

left. Far more important are the rapidly reddening Appalachian districts where Obama

underperformed his 2008 performance which was already an underperformance of Kerry’s 2004

results.

As a consequence, House Republicans do not face the same need to reach out beyond the party’s

core constituencies that their Senate colleagues face, much less whoever is nominated for the

Presidency in 2016. At the same time, given their position in the majority, they will be the branch of

the party that will take the lead on policy for the next two years at the very least.

On a state level, a similar situation prevails. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock could not have

damaged Mitt Romney and the party as a whole quite so thoroughly had their run-ins with the

abortion issue not occurred in the context of efforts by Republican state legislatures to aggressively

target access to abortion, including an intrusive ultra-sound requirement passed by the Virginia

state legislature. Yet while both the party’s presidential nominee and its senate candidates arguably

suffered as a result of these laws, the results for Republican legislators tended to vary based on their

control of redistricting. In states where they were unable to draw the lines, New England, the West

Coast, Colorado, and Iowa, they suffered either wipeouts or heavy losses. Yet of the states where

they drew the lines, only in New Hampshire and New York did they suffer losses. In Ohio, North

Carolina, Wisconsin, and most of the West and South they increased their majorities. In

Pennsylvania and Michigan they suffered only minor losses despite Obama winning both states

comfortably.

As Republicans at both the state and federal level become less dependent on swing or democratic

voters, they will in turn become more dependent on their own, and the challenges posed by

primaries. This will incentivize a drive to the Right, and undermine efforts to moderate, especially if

Republicans have a good year in 2014.

4. Voter ID Laws and Restrictions on Early Voting Backfired on the GOP

In the lead-up to the 2012 election, the battle over how votes would be cast was as brutal in many

states as the battle for votes. Having badly lost the early voting battle in 2008, many Republican

legislatures moved to curtail early voting availability in 2012, including eliminating weekend voting

in Florida and Ohio. Many African American Churches ran “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote

drives in 2008 after Sunday services, and such efforts were perceived in many quarters as an effort

to disrupt Democratic GOTV efforts in 2012. Many states paired these laws with additional

requirements for photo ids to be presented in order to vote and aggressive purges of non-voters

from the voting rolls.

Democrats reacted with outrage, with anger particularly concentrated among African American

leaders who claimed that such policies were a deliberate effort to disenfranchise minority voters.

MSNBC ran extensive coverage of “Republican Voter-Suppression” efforts that the term entered the

lexicon of the election, and Al Sharpton devoted an hour a day to ranting on Republican efforts to

return to Jim Crow. They declared that Voter ID laws and the purges of non-voters were efforts to

prevent Hispanic and African American voters from voting.

These charges are unfair. While restricting Early Voting on Sundays probably had as a motivation

disrupting Democratic campaign efforts, the main reason for these laws was less that Republican

leaders wanted them than that Republican voters demanded them and their leaders obliged.

Regardless of whether widespread fraud was ever a problem, the fact is that a large number of

Republican voters believed that it existed, and Republican leaders learned in 2010 what happened

to Republican elected officials who ignored their constituents.

In the end the both the charges and the immediate consequences of the laws were minimal.

Because fraud was generally not a problem, voter purges in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio had

little to no impact on the election because the dead voters removed from the rolls tended to be

non-voters in any case. The best example of this occurred in Cuyahoga County in Ohio. An aggressive

purge of the voter rolls by the state reduced them from 1.1 million to just over 900,000, but overall

turnout remained largely the same. Voter id laws, where implemented, had little effect. African

American turnout in Georgia had increased in every year since they were implemented in 2006, and

this trend continued in 2012.

Yet if the laws themselves had little consequence, the battle over them was a different matter. Just

as perception was more important than reality among Republican voters, the same was true among

Hispanic and African American voters, who viewed the laws as an attack on their voting rights. These

views seemed confirmed when efforts to get around shortened early voting hours, and the

elimination of Sunday voting, resulted in massive lines. In Florida, media coverage for the final week

before the election was dominated by lines that averaged more than 3 hours in south Florida, and

on Saturday reached 7 hours in Miami-Dade county. Democrats turned the lines into impromptu

rallies, summoning speakers, distributing water bottles, and playing movies. In effect, the lines

became a mobilizing tool for bringing minority voters to the polls.

Lines and energy are infectious. Had there been no efforts to purge illegal aliens from the voter rolls

in Florida, or efforts to restrict early voting, there would still have been lines, but those lines would

not have immediately been blamed on a nefarious Republican plot. In the end, the Republican party

probably lost at least ten voters for every fraudulent vote eliminated or voter discouraged from the

polls.

5. Republican Outreach is unlikely to be successful until the party becomes tolerant of Dissent

In the aftermath of the election Republicans are already discussing ways of reaching out to Hispanics

and young voters. Most of these suggestions focus on policies that the party can adopt, whether

involving some form of support for immigration reform, or abandoning opposition to same-sex

marriage.

The problem with these suggestions is that they imply a misunderstanding of the problem the

Republican party faces. The problem the party has is not based on hostility to either Hispanic, gay or

young individuals per se, but rather on hostility to anyone not within the party. During my years

with the College Republicans I never once encountered a lack of individual tolerance for diversity of

backgrounds. In fact, few organizations at the University level in the United States are so quick to

welcome racial minorities. What the organization however lacked was any sort of tolerance for

political dissent. A substantial level of internal tolerance was paired with hostility towards

Democrats and Democratic voters to such an extent that often the leadership attempted to force

members to choose between friends within and without the organization, with social interaction

with those outside of it often viewed with suspicion and implications of disloyalty.

Because the party is in its current form an ideological entity, Republicans view themselves as

correct, and people who disagree as either stupid or malevolent. This does not present a challenge

when recruiting white voters, since many can function largely within Republican social groups or

exist sufficiently at the fringe of political involvement to avoid the drawbacks. When recruiting

minorities however it does.

The simple fact is that even with substantial outreach efforts, Republicans are highly unlikely to win

a majority of Hispanics, African Americans, Gays, or young voters in the near future. As a

consequence, Republican voting members of these groups will have a majority of acquaintances,

friends, and relatives voting for Democratic candidates, and odds are that a vast majority of those

they interact with on a daily basis will vote for Democrats. Demonizing Democratic voters, means

demonizing these friends, family members, and acquaintances, and therefore will continue to serve

to alienate these groups from the party, reducing its minority support to those willing to cut

themselves off from their own communities. After all, who are voters likely to listen to? Distant and

abstract political figures spouting rhetoric, or those they know?

As a consequence, Republican rhetorical criticism of the African American community for its bloc

voting for Democrats, suggestions that that Hispanics and African Americans are welfare cheats, and

opposition to gay rights tends to undermine Republican support among members of those

subgroups who are not any of the above categories and in fact are likely to agree with Republicans

on political issues. Any Republican breakthrough with minority voters is therefore likely to be

dependent on making it socially acceptable within those communities for individuals to vote

Republican.