When historians look back on Mitt Romney’s bid for the Presidency, one trend will be clear: no Republican candidate ever ran a similar campaign again. … Last Tuesday, Romney won three-fifths of the white vote, matching or exceeding what several winning Presidential candidates, including Reagan in 1980 and Bush in […] Read more »
The Demographic Excuse
… Reliable Republican constituencies — whites, married couples and churchgoers — are shrinking as a share of the electorate. Democratic-leaning constituencies — minorities, recent immigrants, the unmarried and unchurched — are growing, and voting in larger numbers than in the past. But Republicans are also losing because today’s economic landscape […] Read more »
2012: The Year Changing Demographics Caught Up With Republicans
The 2012 election marks the year when the inexorable march of demographic change caught up with the Republican Party. While multiple factors led to President Obama’s reelection, none was as important as rapidly increasing demographic change in the American electorate. Mitt Romney won white voters by a landslide, 59 to […] Read more »
President Obama and the white vote? No problem.
In the run-up to Tuesday’s election, there was much talk that President Obama could be headed to a historically poor showing among white voters, a result that could jeopardize his ability to win the overall popular vote. And, while Obama did lose white voters by 20 points to former Massachusetts […] Read more »
Election Data Dive
… There may have been a backlash against voter suppression laws, bringing more minorities to the polls, not fewer. The share of Hispanic voters rose in many states won by Obama. That can be attributed both to the surging Hispanic population in the country and to the Obama campaign’s incredible […] Read more »
White voter decline in 2012: the conundrum behind the cliche
… You’ve probably heard a demographic story like the one I’m about to tell you regarding the 2012 elections. President Obama won re-election by taking advantage of an expansion of the Latino portion of the electorate. In the network exit polls, Latinos grew their percentage of the electorate from 8.4% […] Read more »