News Obama Reelected: Republicans Feel the Schadenfreude

[Angry Citizen]

And again:
That Loony Lefties are bleating about an Obama landslide and Rabid Righties are wailing about a death knell is not very interesting.
Intelligent commentators, on both sides, calls this a narrow, but solid win for Obama.
Which it was.

"Intelligent" commentators are calling it a "broad" victory for Obama, per Nate Silver.

 

[arildno]

Sure, feel free to make up your facts.

No, you are the one denying the rightward shift from 2008 to 2012, by declaring it to be inadmissible evidence. It is not. It is a..fact.

 

[arildno]

"Intelligent" commentators are calling it a "broad" victory for Obama, per Nate Silver.

He says:
Not a BIG win, but a broad one.

 

[arildno]

Because this election should've been a landslide for you. It wasn't. You lost seats in both the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. The Reagan coalition is dead, and it's only going to get worse. Like I said in another thread, the Republicans are a dead party. The new Republican Party will be more moderate. You wait and see.

Are you getting personal here??
I'm not an American, nor would I have voted for Romney.

 

[Angry Citizen]

He says:
Not a BIG win, but a broad one.

Y'know man..

You can keep telling yourself this wasn't a huge loss for your party. I'm not going to stop you.

 

[micromass]

*shrug* Time will tell. You've been on these boards long enough, and I'm probably not going away, so in a year or so we can hash out just how closely the new Republican Party resembles the one that just got its butt kicked.

I'm very glad Obama won. Very glad. But I fail to see how "landslide" or "butt kicked" characterize these elections. In my opinion, Romney got very close to beating Obama, closer than he should have come. If the republicans elected a better candidate, then they probably would have won.

 

[Pythagorean]

301 to 201 is close?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Does this help?
History of popular vote margins
You can click on the Margin heading next to pct of pop vote and the table will be sorted on that field. This was the 57th election, but there are somewhat less than 57 rows in the table. I think that popular votes were not consistently used in the early years of the country. Anyway, the 2.28% margin this time is 11th from the bottom of the list.

Here is a link that has electoral votes. I haven't found any that give you percentages and sort them. However, a quick look at the numbers shows that 303/535 is anything but a landslide. In fact, Kennedy got 303 and that was considered one of the closest elections ever. If Obama gets Florida, it will be 332/535, still at the low end historically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election

 

[Pythagorean]

I see. I thought 100 electoral votes was a big difference. It's about 20%.

 

[arildno]

I'm very glad Obama won. Very glad. But I fail to see how "landslide" or "butt kicked" characterize these elections. In my opinion, Romney got very close to beating Obama, closer than he should have come. If the republicans elected a better candidate, then they probably would have won.

I am less unhappy that Obama won than Romney.
As to those meaning the 2010 election is truly the only admissible evidence (while 2008 is meaningless being prior in time), one might as well say that 2010 is meaningless because the popular support gained by the Republicans in 2010 had vaporized entirely by mid-2011 lasting into summer 2012, and Mitt Romney made a slight re-energization of GOP towards Election Day.

 

[micromass]

301 to 201 is close?

60,038,554 vs 57,361,032 is close. I don't care whether the popular vote doesn't really matter in electing the president, I feel that the popular vote best represents the sentiment of the population, so I base myself on that.
Furthermore, I find the results in the swing states to be quite close as well.

When watching the republican primaries, I expected Obama to win by a landslide. When watching Romney screw up, I didn't think Obama would be challenged at all. But I still think it got dangerously close.

 

[arildno]

I see. I thought 100 electoral votes was a big difference. It's about 20%.

No, it is not.
Because in "winner-takes-it-all"-systems, slight consistent edges make for massive overrepresentation.
The UK election system is the archetype of that dynamic.

 

[russ_watters]

301 to 201 is close?

In a game where small differences get magnified by the scoring system, yes.

 

[Pythagorean]

Ah yeah, I wasn't thinking of popular vote. It's basically just an elaborate poll with strings attached.

 

[Pythagorean]

I see what you mean.

 

[russ_watters]

I see. I thought 100 electoral votes was a big difference. It's about 20%.

We could also argue that a 1-0 baseball game was won by infinity, but that would be misleading too.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

Ann Coulter's voice in your head? Sorry to hear it - I think there's good drugs for that.

No. This requires brain surgery.

 

[russ_watters]

Meanwhile, the Dow is down about 300 points right now.

 

[arildno]

In a game where small differences get magnified by the scoring system, yes.

And, it is not necessarily "unfair" or "broken".
In a strictly representative system as we have in Norway, we have basically no choice in voting for INDIVIDUALS, our vote goes to a PARTY, so that my vote in Oslo (in Southern norway) might be (in effect) shifted up to Northern Norway to count into a candidate's total count there, in order to make the landwise representativeness closer to the popular vote.

 

[arildno]

No. This requires brain surgery.

Not exorcism??

 

[Pythagorean]

All the banks just lost there bet and none of them even hedged with Obama as far as I saw. (in terms of campaign funding). I wonder how that affects things.

 

[SixNein]

Meanwhile, the Dow is down about 300 points right now.

I doubt it had anything to do with an Obama election. And I think wall street was likely expecting an Obama victory. In addition, not everyone on wall street was anti-obama.

 

[arildno]

I see. I thought 100 electoral votes was a big difference. It's about 20%.

With Obama winning 61% av EVs in 2012, his majority is among the lowest 20 out of 50 elections

 

[Jack21222]

By the way, Russ asked for a pundit saying the word "landslide." Here you go:

http://www.dickmorris.com/prediction-romney-325-obama-213/

Prediction: Romney 325, Obama 213
By Dick Morris on November 5, 2012
Published on TheHill.com on November 5, 2012
Yup. That’s right. A landslide for Romney approaching the magnitude of Obama’s against McCain. That’s my prediction.

Conservative pundit Dick Morris said 325 electoral votes for Romney would be a landslide. So by that logic, Obama's 332 would also be a landslide.

BUT WAIT! http://www.dickmorris.com/why-i-was-wrong/

I’ve got egg on my face. I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker.

So, 325-213 Romney is a landslide... 332-206 Obama is a "squeaker."

I'm hearing something similar from this thread.

 

[arildno]

Doesn't that tell you more about Dick Morris' incompetence than anything else??
The fact is that a 325 win for Romney wouldn't have been a "landslide", by any historically meaningful comparison.

 

[dipole]

The republicans possibly put up the most inept challenger available in an election that was theirs to lose. Obama was perceived as the lesser of evils, not the great hope for the future. I'd have loved to seen a sincere and pragmatic fiscal conservative as an option, but, americans have an ingrained and historic ability to ignore reality. Assuming we recognize the EU template is not the road to prosperity, politics may change for the better after another 4 years of the less than thinly disguised path toward socialism.

What's this all about? Mitt Romney was nominated the presidential candidate by American voters...

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Meanwhile, the Dow is down about 300 points right now.

Buy on the rumor, sell on the news?

 

[Jack21222]

What's this all about? Mitt Romney was nominated the presidential candidate by American voters...

By Republican voters. So he was nominated by Republicans.

 

[George Jones]

"Obama is reelected"

Don't be so fast on the draw:

http://freakofnature.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/particle-physicists-unwilling-to-call-election/

 

[Pythagorean]

"Physicists say that they will continue to monitor the election closely."