… After nearly a year of breathless reports about how Latinos were going to trip over themselves to get to the polls and vote against Mitt Romney’s hard-line immigration stance — remember Time magazine’s Spanish-language cover “Yo Decido”? — the reality is less dramatic. … According to the Census Bureau, the [...] Read more »
Skepticism About the Census Voter Turnout Finding
The Census Bureau made big news last week when it reported that the black voter turnout rate (66.2%) exceeded the white voter turnout rate (64.1%) for the first time ever in 2012. But a closer look at the numbers raises some intriguing questions. It’s possible that the lines may have [...] Read more »
Four reasons it’s hard to campaign your way to the presidency
The narrative after the 2012 campaign was that President Obama’s victory was due to his superior campaign — better messaging, better technology, better organizing, better everything. But this narrative had a circular logic to it: Obama won because of his superior campaign, and we know that his campaign was superior [...] Read more »
Inside The American Crossroads And Koch Post-Mortems
… In the wake of big Democratic victories in 2012, the outside groups that raised and spent so much on Republicans’ behalf have spent a considerable amount of time and effort analyzing their performance. Their goals are two-fold: Improve their strategies and tactics in order to win future races, and convince [...] Read more »
How Much Did the 2012 Air War and Ground Game Matter?
In this third and final post in our mini-symposium on campaign effects in the 2012 presidential election, I’ll report on some of what Lynn Vavreck and I have found in our work for The Gamble. Lynn and I were able to do something that, to our knowledge, has not been [...] Read more »
Blacks Voted at a Higher Rate than Whites in 2012 Election — A First
About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since [...] Read more »
The New Census Data that Should Terrify Republicans
… Today, the Census released the November 2012 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement, which is based on interviews with hundreds of thousands of residents. … It demonstrates that, in the debate about the GOP’s future in an increasingly diverse America, both sides are right, to a certain [...] Read more »
Blacks Made History Surpassing White Voter Turnout Rates
Almost two in three eligible blacks cast ballots in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, marking the first time they had a higher voter participation rate than non-Hispanic whites, a U.S. Census Bureau analysis released today shows. Boosted by an effort to re-elect President Barack Obama, blacks were the only racial [...] Read more »
Obama’s Voter Mobilization Was Barely More Effective than Romney’s
Does the 2012 Obama campaign deserve the hype? Many journalists have praised the technological and strategic advantage of Obama over Romney’s campaign. The 2012 Obama campaign is often described as an extension and improvement of the 2008 effort, which has been credited as one of the first campaigns to make [...] Read more »
Obama’s Victory Wasn’t Thanks to Black Turnout
After decades dreaming of high black turnout, Democrats finally got their wish in the last two elections, with obvious results. President Barack Obama overcame a strong Republican performance among white voters last November, and Monday, an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings, found that black turnout actually exceeded [...] Read more »