Why? (UPDATED)
It seems that vote totals for Romney keep going up, making up the alleged 3 million vote "deficit" we had all heard about. Here is a link with raw vote totals. Romney, according to this chart, has surpassed the 60 million vote mark:
Obama: 65,147,939 (50.91%)
Romney: 60,610,074 (47.36%)
Other: 2,209,061 (1.73%)
A total voter turnout of 127,967,074. (2008 turnout was 131,313,820, 2.55% less.)
So, my question -- "why?" -- has to be readdressed: Why did we fail to convince 5,000,000 2008 Obama voters to vote for Romney in 2012? (Although it may not have made a difference.) We know that the ones who voted for Obama on November 6 are the hard-core Kool-Aid drinkers and moochers; my query now is why the vote deficit and why did we fail to convince even a percentage of these voters.
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The inexplicable datum of the November 6 election, the one that keeps going around and around in my head, is why did 3,000,000 Republicans elect to sit the election out and not vote for Romney? Honestly, for the life of me, I cannot make sense of it.
Any thoughts?
Apathetic slugs.
FWIW:
"Romney passes McCain's 2008 popular vote total, Obama 5.5 mil behind '08 total"
"Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney surpassed 2008's former Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain's popular vote tally on Tuesday."
http://p.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/nov/20/picket-romney-passes-mccain-popular-vote-obama-55-/
Yes, apathy. Plus a good number were also selfish dolts who put their principles and interests above those of the nation. Romney was not conservative enough for some of these absentee voters, or too conservative for others. Among the selfish dolts one can assume that many were Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals who refused to vote for a Mormon.
The thing is Obama and company did not need impressive totals and obviously did not get impressive totals. They just got them in the places where they needed to for the electoral big win.
And I too would like to know who these non voters were because I would like to be able to put the lie once and for all to the idea I hear constantly that if the Republicans don't give up the social issues, they will always lose. I believe it is the opposite, that if they disregard the bloc of voters who vote because of the social issues, Republicans will never win.
One day the results will be pored over and we will get a better idea of who the non voters were.
Well, that's illuminating. Obama's vote totals are still far below 2008, yet we couldn't muster enough interest, in a critical election year, among undecideds and/or apathetic voters to turn the tide.
Pathetic.
Dick Morris, Karl Rove and many others telling everyone that Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide. Many people felt it was a sure thing because the turnout was going to be sooooo greeeeeaaaaatttt, and decided to stay home. It just so happened that 3 million Republicans all thought the same way.
No, I don't think it was that way, firefly. I think those who did not vote had decided in advance not to vote to teach the Republicans a lesson or something stupid like that.
And I believe that Morris and Rove expected a landslide because they saw that Obama's numbers were so low and didn't realize that our side would have so many non voters.
I made many phone calls for the Republican party and the enthusiasm for Republicans to vote was enormous. They couldn't wait to go to the polls. Same for early voters. The numbers there were higher for our side than originally expected. When I encountered someone who thought there was no difference between the two candidates, I tried to talk them out of that idea. Sometimes it worked. But often undecideds were fixed in stone.
What the dems had over us was their relentless lying negative ads from the word go and the msm that repeated the big lies. I got letters from people who believed the dishonest image of Romney that those ads portrayed and I was dismayed how intelligent people could have so easily become susceptible to such ideas.
Romney did not have a strategy of counting certain areas or people that would have brought up his electoral votes. The dems did what they needed to do to win. Some of it surely was stealing votes for dems and cheating. But the win was too large for that to have been the reason.
The American electorate has changed for the worse and now we will all have to suffer for what has been elected.
But the news is not all bad. All polls showed that Americans by a big majority did not want Obamacare or big government or big spending. We have 30 governorships and that is huge and some are terrific - Pence is good presidential material; he's Gingrich without the flaws. We got statehouses and two solid new conservative senators (one not too well liked here) and we kept the House in the wake of Obama's "landslide".
Now the left will do lots of damage, no doubt; they already have continued their worst. But this country does not want what these guys are selling. We must keep testing Obamacare in the courts. And we must not allow these people to steal our retirement funds and turn them into defined benefit plans from government largesse. We must not allow the U.N. to be our masters, etc.
And we have got to be sure in future to find some way to get every vote from our side and not take them for granted, and to woo those groups of voters who drank the Kool Aid in the Hispanic and Asian communities, not by lying or promising them or pandering, but by going to them and showing that we are interested in them and that we have the policies that will make their lives better.
And when there is a foreign policy debate, we must not shirk our responsibility; we must be prepared to bring up Bengazi, for example, if it is something the American people have been lied to about. As one person on the NR cruise said, "Nest time, I don't want a nice guy; I want a bastard!"
AND our Republican leaders in Congress must learn not to compromise with Obama just so their ratings will go up. We must be principled. If we have to let the tax cuts lapse, so be it. The American people voted for lots of spending. Let them pay for it in their tax rates. Let them see that elections have consequences.
I don't want to see Boehner making nice to Obama so the voters will see that we are trying to cooperate. I want no raising of rates. Let the House present a bill that cuts spending substantially and does not raise tax rates on anyone. And let them explain that growth will bring in revenue. Then when Obama says no, let Obama and the Senate present their ideas.
Obama and company do not believe their rhetoric of if you cut taxes, how will you pay for that. They know that's a false formulation. But their goal is not to "care" about the middle class. They will not get that much money from the rich. No, their goal is to destroy the private sector and make everyone dependent on the government. They are more than halfway to their goal. We have to stop them, not be useful idiots for them.
Also, when the dems praise the Clinton era growth (ahem, the Gingrich/Armey era growth), they neglect to mention the rate of spending which was much lower than now. Since our side is not going to get anything we want, why not ask for the moon? Then when we are refused we can say at least we tried. This nickel and diming of less than one percent cuts in spending when the spending has gone up in recent years in record numbers is mind numbing. We should be demanding huge cuts. We won't get them. But let the voters see we are trying to be serious about spending and the other side is the joke.
I heard many a foolish jerk, supposedly conservatives, say they would not vote for Romney because he was a 1) mormon, 2) not conservative enough, 3) not another guy they liked better, 4) you fill in the blank. No amount of explaining the harm this would do swayed these idiots from their stubborn position. I'm sure the election results has not taught them a lesson either, because if they had been capable of learning they wouldn't have done this in the first place. Shows how the dumbing down of America is not only found in obvious liberals, the mental void has spread out to all segments of society.
I'm still baffled by it, but apparently the absent voters aren't jobless/filing for bankruptcy/losing their homes ...just yet. I think the downward slide started early over a very looooooong primary season when Romney couldn't gin up the enthusiasm; the convention was anti-climactic, despite all the great (& DIVERSE) conservatives that were present -- not enough to light the fire under the collective butts of many in the American Idol-watching crowd that opted to stay home.
As for the evangelicals' refusal to vote, it isn't fair to paint them all with such a broad brush: on my end there are thousands of them, and every single one I knew either voted or campaigned for Mr. Romney. One big concern of theirs, believe it or not, was not abortion, but the deplorable treatment Israel has suffered at the hands of this WHouse.
We simply must admit we have a large portion of the electorate drunk on the nanny state kool-aid. It's been in the works for nearly 100 years.
Gigi: Regarding 'absent voters' ... Sure, there were some ... But let me say again that according to real time uodated vote totals Romney overall got MORE votes than McCain. See links in my post up above.
Basically Romney did better than McCain. Did some potential voters not show up? Sure. But Romney more than made up for it by attracting some new or different voters.
I do not have a link handy, but I read a while ago that Romney actually did very good with the evangelical voters.
It's unfortunate than election night conjecture (about 3 million absent voters) is still being treated as fact because real time vote totals show that it is not fact at all. Romney did BETTER than McCain. Just not better enough.
P.S. Sorry for the typos above. I was on a device with a tiny keyboard and you know how that is.
Alas, the number of people stupid enough to be dysfunctional as a result is VERY high, probably higher than anybody wants to know. Non-liberals who could have voted for Romney but chose not to, for whatever reason, are at least as stupid as people who voted for Obama, and if they could see that Obama was bad for the country, then not voting for Romney was both irresponsible and counterproductive. It was actually worse than that—we’re talking useless citizens, even if it’s a case of purity-unto-death (which is typically not about purity, but about pride).
I am constantly amazed at the 3 of people that vote for "others". Is this a conversation starter? "Gee, I voted for xyz because of... whatever!"
"Others" ... The Green Party took nearly half a million votes. I think the super sneaky genius move would be for the rich conservative donors to funnel money to the Green Party, in the hopes of building it into a truly viable alternative for the liberals to vote for. Fracture the liberal vote and come up the middle. It has worked elsewhere.