The only presidential candidate to suffer a larger home state loss was the first-ever Republican nominee, John Frémont of California. Frémont received only 18.8 percent of the vote in California in 1856, good for a distant third place behind Democrat James Buchanan and third party candidate and former president Millard Fillmore.
Frémont received only 18.8 percent of the vote in California in 1856, good for a distant third place behind Democrat James Buchanan and third party candidate and former president Millard Fillmore.
America was once the land of the free. Now we want to be told what to do. More government is good. We want stuff. On Tuesday America changed. But the fight is not over.
Everywhere you went, virtually or physically, the Obama and Romney campaigns followed you. Did you start noticing Romney ads popping up in your browser, even if you just went to his website briefly and had no intention of voting for him? That was because of browser tools the candidates used or built to harvest data. Campaigns and political strategy firms paid good money for your web usage data, filtered it through their predictions for associating your browser history with your political affiliation—NPR junkie? You lefty, you—filtered it again through publicly-available elections data and slipped in a candidate’s plea for $5.
Tom Lea, a tall, suited Republican from Southern California, was standing near a table piled high with baked pretzels and mini-slices of cheese and mushroom pizza when the call was made. Lea was angry—at the voters who'd inexplicably handed President Obama a second term, at a Congress divided by gridlock, at the direction of the country as a whole. "It doesn't get any more bleak than this," Lea told me. "This is not hyperbole: This country is done. The writing's on the wall. Dead."
"It doesn't get any more bleak than this," Lea told me. "This is not hyperbole: This country is done. The writing's on the wall. Dead."
What went wrong? For Rove, just about everything. Throughout the entire campaign, the bitter division between the GOP establishment—Rove and his cronies—and the Tea Partiers severely limited his power. Rove’s inability to oust Missouri senatorial candidate Todd “illegitimate rape” Akin played a key role in allowing the Democrats to retain control of the Senate. Mitt Romney’s attempts to straddle the two wings of the party reduced him to an etch-a-sketch candidate who did not have a clearly defined narrative. GOP efforts at voter suppression failed to subdue the growing Hispanic vote for the Democrats—a demographic time bomb that will only worsen for Republicans. And ultimately for Rove, running the party by remote control, playing pundit while he secretly pulled the strings, had its limits.