My GOP relatives are now posting that the reason Romney didn't win is that "our base didn't show up." To paraphrase their thinking they same to be making the argument that: the electorate didn't really change. There are still lots of white voters. It's not about the brown and black people, it is still about the white people. It's still our country. Our people just didn't like Romney and/or didn't show up because Obama's negative campaigning turned them off.
Has anyone of our math based reality friends looked at this case? It all seems to be based on a Real Clear Politics post by a guy named Sean Trende. His post is full of assumptions and I assume is complete bullshit but I don't know enough about the numbers to make a call
Kos posted a diary making fun of Dick Morris' take on this but this meme is bigger than Dick Morris - it is the new Fox Zombie idea. Love to hear what people think.
Here's the agrument from the post...
But most importantly, the 2012 elections actually weren’t about a demographic explosion with non-white voters. Instead, they were about a large group of white voters not showing up.
Armed with the exit-poll data, we can get a pretty good estimate of how many whites, blacks, and Latinos cast ballots in both 2008 and 2012. Assuming the 72/13/10/5 percentage split described above for 2012, that would equate to about 91.6 million votes cast by whites, 16.6 million by blacks, 12.7 million by Latinos, with the balance of 6.3 million votes spread among other groups.
Compare this with 2008, when the numbers were 98.6 million whites, 16.3 million blacks, 11 million Latinos, and 5.9 million from other groups.
In other words, if our underlying assumption -- that there are 7 million votes outstanding -- is correct, then the African-American vote only increased by about 300,000 votes, or 0.2 percent, from 2008 to 2012. The Latino vote increased by a healthier 1.7 million votes, while the “other” category increased by about 470,000 votes.
This is nothing to sneeze at, but in terms of the effect on the electorate, it is dwarfed by the decline in the number of whites. Again, if our assumption about the total number of votes cast is correct, almost 7 million fewer whites voted in 2012 than in 2008. This isn’t readily explainable by demographic shifts either; although whites are declining as a share of the voting-age population, their raw numbers are not.