Some thoughts on what the 2012 presidential election "means"

I have to confess that there was some initial apprehension concerning the presidential election results last night, with the first vote counts in “battleground” states tending toward Romney, but as expected, smaller, Republican-leaning counties reported first, and as the larger county counts came in, the advantaged shifted toward Obama. As the hours drew long, Obama appeared to be winning in every one of these states, and one-by-one they fell into the Obama Electoral College column: Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia. The only holdout was Florida, but it appears that Obama will eventually win that state as well. The only states that switched from 2008 to the Republicans was Indiana and North Carolina, but these states were won by Obama by less than one percent in 2008, and were never considered in play by the Democrats in 2012. 

Much was made of the fact that Romney was leading in the popular vote, but this lead melted away and reversed in favor of Obama as the New York and California votes came in. There were those right-wing pundits who held-out to the end: Karl Rove—who “guaranteed” that Romney would carry Ohio—insisted to his doubting Fox News colleagues that there was some kind of media conspiracy to ignore Romney votes still in play, but he was eventually sidelined to argue with himself. Texas, as expected, was the only large state that Romney won, but everywhere else it was apparent that states with major population centers trended in a big way toward Obama. This no doubt helped overcome the last Miami Herald poll which allegedly showed Romney with a 5-point lead in Florida; the Herald now claims Obama benefited from an "underestimation" of his support, and an implicit rejection of Tea Party conservatism in the state.

With the Electoral College count virtually even when the polls closed on the “left coast,” there were no further doubts that Obama would win reelection. It cannot be said precisely what effect Republican efforts at voter suppression had on the election (or the hate and deceit that filled the right-wing airwaves), but it was not enough to swing the election to Romney; although Obama received fewer votes than in 2008, the Romney vote did not increase over John McCain’s—in fact it may be even less. This suggests that while there was some “natural” vote-shifting, it didn’t help Romney overmuch because the overall vote was well down from 2008 for Republicans as well as Democrats.

I will give Mitt Romney credit for a generous, thoughtful concession speech—much different than Missouri Republican Todd Akin’s deliberate indecency; I briefly felt empathy for Romney—before I remembered that that this country narrowly averted a return to the failed policies that brought this country tumbling into the economic and fiscal abyss it found itself in 2008. “Obamacare”—likely the last best chance at meaningful health care reform this country will have—is saved for the time being, and a complete shift of wealth to the tiny few was averted. 

Of course, there were “interpretations” of what the election meant. Few believed that Obama had been given a “mandate,” and many insisted that it was Obama, not the Tea Party right in Congress, that needed to adapt despite the drubbing that Tea Party-affiliated Republicans took in the Senate races. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer stubbornly refused to acknowledge that Republicans needed to change—save in regard to  “rethinking” their approach to Latino voters, who exit polls showed actually increased their support for Obama from 2008. A female commentator on MSNBC of an extreme feminist bent claimed that it was gender issues that were the “key” to the election, but ABC News noted in the battleground state of Virginia—won by a slim margin by Obama—Romney easily won the white female vote by a 61-39 margin. White female commentators are engaging in hyperbole when they say that the greater part of minority women, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama, were motivated by the same issues as an apparently small cadre of white feminist voters (many of whom out of spite supported McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012). The reality is that, as an NBC exit poll that showed white women favoring Romney overall by a 56-42 margin demonstrated, Obama could only count on those white voters who traditionally lean left on most issues.

There was talk by the right that election showed that the country was “center-right,” and this was another reason why the generally centrist Obama had to compromise with the extremist agenda of the Tea Party element in the House. But again exit polls told a different story: Moderate voters favored Obama by a significant 56-41 margin, meaning that it is the extremists in the Republican party who need to rethink their approach to governance. Although Republicans maintained in the House of Representatives, this could change in 2014 if Republicans are not seen meeting Obama and the Democrat-held Senate half-way. It is useful to remember that Republicans in Congress refused to do so in Obama’s first term for the stated reason that they wanted to prevent his reelection. They failed, and for what purpose now? The country was only damaged by Republican intransigence. There is no doubt that the country still faces many challenges, particularly on the fiscal front. But the solutions require give on both sides, not just from the Democrats, which many of us see as having gone too far in that direction; the absurdity is the Republican claim that they have “compromised” too much, when any rational person can see they have been as unmoving as a statue.  

As an aside, in the state of Washington, it appears that Democrat Jay Inslee is on his way to winning election for governor; the Seattle Times has thus taken another hit to its shrinking credibility after its support both editorially and in its reporting of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna. Why a newspaper representing a left-leaning city would embarrass itself (as it did in 2000, when it endorsed George W. Bush) by supporting this faker can only be explained by the behind-the-scenes influence of its right-leaning publisher.