Much has been made of Karl Rove's strangely worded statements on Fox News that Obama's team won because they “succeeded in suppressing the vote.” Note, though, that Rove is not using the word in the classic use of actual "voter suppression" of the sort he's employed. Maybe it's a Freudian slip. He's using it in a broader context to mean suppressing enthusiasm, of a character assassin whispering in the ear of white America. Karl Rove sees things quite literally in black and white.
But even at that, he's wrong. Republicans got the same percentage of the white vote as they got in the last election. What Turdblossom is really grousing about is his failed math based on a racial strategy.
From the start of the whole contrived billionaire-backed Tea Party campaigns, the bet the Rovian confederates made was that they could subtly use economic arguments to reflect underlying racial resentment in order to increase white turnout for them. ("They want stuff. We work for it.")
Yes, the Latino vote increased, but it was figured into their math. They truly thought they could surpass it by leveraging racial resentment in whites. If Latinos and African-Americans went wholly to Obama, it would only serve their model of race baiting. It was their old idea of conquer through division raised from surface tension to lapping waves of anger. Deflect the class warfare between the middle class and the plutocrats (99% vs. the 1%) by turning the election into an implicit race war (roughly 64% white vs. the 36% other). Seems like better odds, right?
This is why Rove and his cronies were entirely convinced they were going to win despite Nate Silver and legitimate polls falling squarely against them. They were using a different model of white voter turnout based on painstaking market research and tested strategies from the lower turnout mid-terms -- and this is why Rove had such a wicked witch on-air meltdown as his model imploded before his eyes. Their expected +5% increase in white voter turnout didn't materialize. Their math was not the math. It was confounding. The white vote must have been mysteriously suppressed by those dirty dems!
Only it wasn't. The real story was not some clever Romney-demonizing message that Democrats targeted toward white voters. Rove is scapegoating according to his own understanding of how elections are manipulated. He's grasping for answers to something he clearly doesn't understand. It has to be some sort of suppression! But the real story is not the Dems. The real story is the voter suppression the Republicans inflicted upon themselves, specifically from the women's vote.
Rachel Maddow breaks it down pretty clearly here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
All along the Republicans were rolling merrily along with a self-destruct bug planted in their machine -- the fanatical, extreme Pro-Life movement that insisted on ideological purity. And when their chosen ideologues finally spoke outside of their own self-affirming echo chamber, women -- their own women, all women -- heard where they were planning on taking them and said, NO YOU DON'T. That's where those extra margins were lost. Not from a hurricane. Not from opposition advertising. It came from within, from the darkest places of their own soul, misty-eyed over forcing women to carry to term rape babies and incest babies and proclaiming that it was all God's will.
The problem for them is that the Pro-Life movement was a necessary part of their tri-cornered coalition (hate, pro-life, and billionaire bucks). The Pro-Lifers are their ground soldiers, mobilizing and staffing and believing in the cause, culling congregations of churches, knocking on doors, manning phones in much the role that the LGBT community fills for democrats. What the Rovian players failed to recognize, however, was that the Pro-Life movement contained a self-destruct button the moment it achieved or nearly achieved its goal. Women's suffrage was ratified in 1920, you dopes.
But now the button has been pressed and their party has imploded. They are in quite a fix. The Republicans can no longer win with this strategy. They can increase Latino votes, and they still cannot win by holding onto the Pro-Lifers for last I checked, half of Latinos were women, too. They cannot gain Latinos and African-Americans by holding court on race issues. They cannot increase the ever-narrowing margins of the white vote without utilizing implicit bigotry. They lose their foot soldiers if they distance themselves from the Pro-Lifers. The future of the Republican Party is now a no-win situation. And it is this bucket of water that has been thrown onto Karl Rove as he sits and melts in a puddle amid the Crossroads of his own doing.