Obama Won On Ideas, Not Demographics

GOP's 'president pandered' argument a loser

Since Barack Obama won re-election, many Republicans have have offered up a number of different reasons about why the GOP took a good, old-fashioned butt kicking last Tuesday. With President Obama winning 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, right-wing and conservative pundits have blamed the loss on everything from Mitt Romney's faux-conservative stance, to the “Sandy and Chris” Show that effectively shut Romney out of national press for a week, while giving Obama the perfect platform to “look presidential.”

The loss was so catastrophic and so unanticipated that Mitt Romney didn’t even write a concession speech.

While on the “Today” show on Monday, conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich said that he was “dumbfounded” by the President’s win, and how he beat Romney more handedly than he did John McCain in 2008. The former Republican Speaker of the House went on to say "I was wrong last week, as was virtually every major Republican analyst. And so, you have to stop and say to yourself, if I was that far off, what do I need to learn to better understand America?"

Newsweek columnist David Frum had a different take on last week’s events, suggesting the right-leaning electorate has been hoodwinked by the “conservative entertainment complex” that ostensibly include the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Dick Morris, both of whom predicted a Romney win, or in Morris’ case, a “landslide” win. 

New York Times blogger and numbers guru Nate Silver called it right, and if you’re a believer in math and reason, it was all right there to see. The majority of polls that saw Obama heading toward reelection reflected a very different demographic set than what Obama and John McCain were dealing with four years ago, with the number of Latinos increasing, and the influence of the white vote shrinking. Former RNC Chair Michael Steele shared on MSNBC that, every month, 50,000 Latinos turn voting age, a claim first made by another GOP pundit and which Politifact finds is "mostly true." All this suggests that this wave of 600,000 new potential voters every year had to be courted by the GOP and not ostracized and marginalized by them, as they were in the Republican primaries.