It’s easy to understand why some Republicans and pollsters dismissed the idea that the Obama coalition from 2008 would be fired up and ready to go in 2012. Not possible. Not with the unemployment rate at 14.3 percent among blacks, 10 percent among Hispanics, and 11.8 percent among adults under 30.
Yet, fired up or just trudging to the polls, those groups were among President Obama’s principal bulwarks against defeat in decisive states. …
Some Republicans may have privately anticipated the demographic and political tsunami about to drown their White House hopes for the second time in a row, but many behaved as if they did not see it coming. “Why the empty stridency of the last days of Obama’s last campaign? Perhaps he feels an earthquake’s first tremors,” George Will wrote in an eviscerating column on Oct. 31; he predicted Romney would win 321 electoral votes and the presidency. [cont.]
Jill Lawrence, National Journal