Dick Morris.
It really is impressive how Dick Morris can keep piling
fail on top of fail.
Now that all the data is in, the fundamental reason for Romney’s defeat is apparent, if largely unreported. It is not just that blacks, Latinos, and single women showed up in record numbers at the polls. It’s that whites didn’t.
The final numbers suggest that 91.6 million votes were cast by whites — seven million less than the 98.6 million that were cast in 2008! Meanwhile, 16.6 million blacks voted — 300,000 more than in 2008; 11 million Latinos voted — 1.7 million more votes than were cast by Hispanics in 2008.
131.3 million Americans cast votes in 2008. Unlike what Morris states, the numbers aren't final, but it looks like there will be about 129 million cast this year.
According to the exit polls, that means that 92.9 million whites cast ballots in 2012, compared to 97.2 million in 2008. Not sure where Morris is getting his numbers, but certainly not from planet reality. Oh, and that's 4.3 million less whites, not seven million.
Furthermore, the percentage of African Americans was 13 percent in both 2008 and 2012. So with overall turnout down, that means that African American turnout is also down marginally. Morris thinks their turnout increased by 300,000. According to the exit polls, it actually decreased by 300,000. Of course, this is within the exit polling margin of error, but it's the only hard data we have about election turnout. Morris is just pulling shit ouf of you-know-where. As usual. As for Latinos, 1.7 million more cast votes in 2012, which is what Morris wrote. So how can he get a single data point right, and others so wrong?
Oh, and he gets much, much more wrong. Follow me below the fold for more.
10:10 AM PT: BPARTR in the comments makes a great point:
Morris and everyone else seems to think if more whites had voted they would all have voted for Romney- but that is bunk. Even if Morris is right, and 4.3 million whites stayed home because of Sandy- Romney still would have lost the popular vote by more than 2 million votes.
Obama's current lead in the popular vote is nearly five million. Romney could win 100 percent of the 4.3 million white voters who dropped off from 2008 and still win the national popular vote. This election just wasn't that close.
We lost because whites stayed home! Particularly among the elderly, the voter turnout was disappointing with seniors casting only 16% of the vote, much less than had been anticipated. (Seniors were the only age group that Obama lost by a significant margin — 15 points).
Voters over the age of 65 were 16 percent of the vote in 2008 ... and they were 16 percent of the vote in 2012. The only people who had "anticipated" a higher percentage of senior voters were the idiot unskewers. And idiots like Morris too stupid to even properly unskew.
In fact, seniors performed as anticipated.
Why didn’t whites vote and why didn’t we all spot it sooner?
Impact of Sandy.
Oh no, not this shit again.
There was no good national polling after Sandy struck. Gallup, for example, suspended its polling. At the last minute, it put together a national sample — with lots of disclaimers about the dangers of inaccuracies due to the difficulty of sampling storm-hit areas — and it showed a slight Romney lead.
If you cite Gallup or Rasmussen political polling, you are by definition an idiot. Gallup was off by five points, and that's after their magical skewing of their own poll post-Sandy to bring it closer in line with other polling. Fact is, as I've
posted before, Sandy made no impact on the polling composite:
The data is clear. Three events had an impact on the late numbers, and all three of them were debates—the first presidential, the veep, and the second presidential. You can claim Sandy had an impact all you want, the national numbers and that in the battleground states are crystal clear—there was no impact. And remember, all this polling underestimated Obama's final numbers. So even polling skewed toward Romney (thanks to Gallup, Rasmussen, and the baby Rasmussens) didn't show any Sandy effect.
Romney was, in fact, leading before Sandy and that his chances blew away in the storm with its famous bipartisan photo of Governor Chris Christie with Obama. And there was no way to measure the impact of Sandy since there could not logistically be any polling. Why was I wrong? I’m a pollster, not a meteorologist!
Morris was wrong because he couldn't use a calculator to save his life. And he still can't. Look at the chart above. Obama was already leading, and by even more in the battlegrounds. Like Virginia, for example:
And let's remember, Morris wasn't just wrong on the margins. He predicted a landslide on Fox:
We’re going to win by a landslide. It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle a whole question as to why the media played this race as a nail-biter ... My own view is that Romney is going to carry 325 electoral votes.
So he's really going to argue that a hurricane that had no impact on the polling, and had no appreciable impact on any battleground states, and that if anything it suppressed the Democratic vote in New Jersey and New York ... was the difference between his ridiculous fantasy prediction and reality?
I'm not a meteorologist, not a pollster for that matter. And I nailed this election better than anyone else. Because I'm not a moron. Back to his latest missive:
These withering attacks undermined Romney’s standing among white voters and led directly to their diminished turnout. The Romney campaign and the Super PACs were so wedded to their attack ads that they failed to realize that Bain posed a mortal threat to the credibility of their candidate. Many other consultants joined me in pleading in vain for a reply to the Bain attacks, but none was forthcoming.
Wait a second, I thought Romney was headed toward a landslide victory until Sandy hit? If Romney would've won this thing easy with clear skies over New Jersey and New York, what does Bain have to do with anything? Heck, Morris' looming landslide would suggest that Bain wasn't such a mortal threat after all.
Not to mention, if the Romney campaign ignored Dick Morris, it might be the only thing they did correctly the entire year.
There is a very good story to be told about Bain and it was masterfully captured in an ad produced by Romney media guru Stuart Stevens but was aired for only limited times and there was no follow up. Had that very ad been run more, Romney would, in my opinion, have been elected president!
But he was going to win a landslide until Sandy hit! What does Bain have to do with anything?
The Republican consultants are so enamored of negative ads that they do not appreciate the impact of rebuttal media and its capacity to wipe away negatives and trigger a backlash against the candidate who airs them. But the doctrine of always attack — reminiscent of the French and British generals in World War I — does not permit rebuttals, only new negatives.
So the Republican consultants were supposed to air rebuttal ads against Hurricane Sandy, which was the only thing that stood between Romney and his landslide victory?
And we paid the price.
Yes, Dick Morris certainly has. He might want to ditch the royal "we," however.
Still, can someone truly decipher the arc of this story?
1. Romney lost because whites didn't vote.
2. Whites didn't vote because Sandy. And Christie.
3. Without Sandy, Romney was headed toward landslide victory so don't blame Morris he's not a meteorologist for crissakes.
4. Nevermind that Sandy stuff, it was actually Bain.
5. Republican consultants attacked too much.
6. The end.
Hilarious.