Election Observations

By Steve Sailer

11/10/2012

A reader writes:

1. House democrats beat House GOP in popular vote

2. Obama has fewer popular votes than Bush 04 but the gap is getting smaller as they count all the votes. Is that lost white vote the Massachusetts moderate thing or the Mormon thing?

3. Nate Silver calculates the GOP needs to win the presidential popular vote by 2% to tie the electoral college.


How stable are biases in the Electoral College? I can recall everybody assuming after 2000 that the Republicans had an advantage in the EC, but then Kerry almost sneaked the 2004 election by winning in Ohio, so it looks like the Dems have had the EC advantage for 3 elections in a row.

4. National polling is skewed GOP by the large white bloc vote and high white turnout in red states

5. Romney won white women

6. Reagan 84 and Romney 12 won the same percentage of the white vote, which would be my biggest concern if I was GOP. Robin Hanson’s forager vs farmer is real. The GOP should vote against any Hudson River tunnel or mass transit anywhere that makes it easier to fit a lot of people in cities.


Vote for water projects in Idaho, that kind of thing.

7. There aren’t many modern post World War 1 two term presidents and fewer got more than 50% popular vote in both runs. Obama is one of them.

8. Obama has done a lot, but even if you think he didn’t, his presence had made it safe to be an open liberal. The climate is such that gay marriage and legal marijuana are now tossups in many states. We're far from freedom fries.

9. Minority GOP candidates are a non starter. No Rubio, no Condi. This makes it too easy for Reagan Democrats to go home. The GOP should go the opposite and find "regulation whites" as was said in Primary Colors, Protestant guys like Rob Portman, Thune, or Virginia’s McDonnell. Charisma doesn’t matter. Rational whites don’t need to be inspired. Sober whites look askance of rhetoric.


I suspect Romney was helpful in nudging the Republican brand a little toward the Responsible Grown-Up direction that it needed to go after Bush.

10. The GOP should focus mid term elections. The GOP has a structural deficit in presidential years (electoral college, Dem machine) so they should try to push important ballot issues and most promising candidates then.

11. An emerging line is Romney was bruised from a long primary fight. For some reason this doesn’t hurt the Dems which don’t use winner take all system. Maybe the GOP should reorder the process to protect viable candidates, or restrict the field to senators, VPs, and governors. The GOP likes order, they'd tolerate it.

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