Saturday 10 November 2012

US election marginalia

Non-voters favoured Obama over Romney 59%-24%, nearly 2½-1.

Obama won the black vote 9-1, the asian vote 3-1. But he lost the "white" vote. Again. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white voters since Republicans adopted their "southern strategy" in the 1970s to take advantage of white southern hatred of mid-sixties civil rights legislation to undo southern apartheid.

Complaining about Nate Silver's straightforward statistical arithmetic, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg says "I like to think that people are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched."

The Romney campaign's confidence was based on what they thought was killer get-out-the-vote technology called Project Orca. Yes, they named it after that whale. The project is described here. An insider says “the Obama training manuals made Orca look like a drunken monkey slapped together in a powerpoint”.

Another insider says Romney consultants “looked at the guy who could raise the most money in history as a ride”. The Romney campaign was done in by private enterprise. Karma?

Republicans painted Obama as a socialist, but as Brad DeLong points out, "Obama broadly follows Ronald Reagan's (second term) security policy, George H.W. Bush's spending policy, Bill Clinton's tax policy, the bipartisan Squam Lake Group's financial-regulatory policy, Rick Perry's immigration policy, John McCain's climate-change policy, and Mitt Romney's health-care policy." 

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