Barack Obama won because he recognized a New America. The President managed only 39 percent of the white vote, the lowest white percentage recorded for a winning national candidate, and suffered a 12-point swing against him among independent voters, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide […] Read more »
Misreading Election 2012
Postelection talk of “lessons learned” is often exaggerated and misleading, and so it is in 2012. A week after President Obama won re-election, two themes are dominant. First, that Mr. Obama kept his job because key elements of his base—notably young people, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans—turned out for him. Second, […] Read more »
The Little-Known Pollster That Bested All the Others
The venerated Gallup Poll took a beating this year for being such an outlier in its predictions of who would win the presidency, and the New York Times’s Nate Silver has now served up further evidence that the firm has lost its mojo. … What pollster nailed its predictions? A […] Read more »
GOP Grapples With Embarrassing Polling Failures
… Before Election Day, Republicans confidently predicted they would pick up seats in both chambers of Congress, and that Mitt Romney would win the White House. The results shattered those predictions, and with them any sense of security in the numbers coming out of some of the best-regarded polling firms […] Read more »
Young Voters in the 2012 Presidential Election
An estimated 23 million young Americans under the age of 30 voted in the 2012 presidential election which is on par with voting rates during the 2008 presidential election. CIRCLE estimates that youth voter turnout was 50 percent of those (18-to-29) eligible to vote. … This CIRCLE fact sheet summarizes […] Read more »
The real election and mandate
President Obama won an Electoral College landslide and a 3 or 4-point national victory – against the great odds posed by prolonged high unemployment, lack of income gains, a barely perceptible recovery and political gridlock that kept his job approval at just 50 percent at best. He won because he […] Read more »