Where did all the Whiteys Go?

Romney received around 57.8 million votes in 2012. In 2008, John McCain received 59.9 million. Romney got over 2 million fewer votes than McCain.

Obama received 60.6 million votes in 2012, almost 9 million less than he received in 2008.

Romney won independents by 5 points, and they made up 29% of all voters. McCain didn’t win independents.

What does this really mean? That’s where the hurt comes. It appears to mean that our side lost because we failed to turn out our side. (Paul Kengor - McCain beats Romney)

I am uninterested in the post-election naval-gazing, but I find analysis of the numbers fascinating, and Sean Trende is one of the best. He’s not a Carl Rove that tells the base what they want to hear. He is a numbers guy who knows how to read them and explain them. He blogged about the polling discrepancies we saw pre-election, and he was one of the few who did not jump on the “the polls are wrong, Romney will win” bandwagon.

He analysis of this year’s election result numbers suggest that this was not a demographic tidal wave, sweeping the old and the white out in an undertow to oblivion.

The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator, it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator. (The Case of the Missing White Voters)

White people are still out there, they just didn’t vote at 2008 levels.

if our assumption about the total number of votes cast is correct, almost 7 million fewer whites voted in 2012 than in 2008. This isn’t readily explainable by demographic shifts either; although whites are declining as a share of the voting-age population, their raw numbers are not. (The Case of the Missing White Voters)

He goes into an in-depth analysis of Ohio, finding that the biggest drop in voting happened in heavily white, blue collar and high unemployment areas of the state.

Yuval Leven expounds on this finding:

the story of this election is not massive turnout of the Democratic base but exceptionally depressed turnout of a portion of the electorate that, when it votes, tends to vote Republican.

Those were after all the two parts of President Obama’s cynical and substance-free campaign strategy: to work the most intensely committed and reliable parts of his base into a frenzy while persuading the least committed and reliable part of the Republican base (white working-class voters) that Mitt Romney didn't deserve their support so they should just sit it out.
[…]
using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat—was by far the more successful and important. Those voters were not going to support Obama, but they could be kept away from Romney, and evidently they were. (The Election and the Right)

This is not a Rovian cry of “Obama suppressed the white vote!” President Obama’s team did what campaigns do, so it is far from unprecedented. They won fair and square. And how dumb do you have to be to let a few campaign commercials talk you into staying home? These were GOP voters that the party and the candidate could not motivate to get up off of their asses and go vote their own interests.

Levin’s message: Don’t pander, present your core beliefs, and run with a positive message of who you are. Romney was a clean slate to many, and millions of dollars of attack ads successfully painted him as a rich plutocrat who not only wants to fire you, but who will kill your wife as well and make your raped daughter carry that baby to term. And it worked, because Romney and the GOP failed to define their candidate and their message.

 Such is politics.

See also:  The voters Who Stayed Home