http://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/78 ... wrong.htmlFri., Nov. 11, 2016
What Went Wrong?
It appears we’re in that stage of the post-election grieving process where everyone’s playing the blame game. Blame the Democratic National Committee, blame the mainstream press, blame sexism, blame xenophobia, blame the electoral college, blame the pollsters, blame third-party voters, blame Comey.
I get it: blame is cathartic. But if you’re looking to cast admonishment here, I’d like to point out an elephant (bad pun, sorry) in the room that isn’t getting nearly enough attention: the people who didn’t vote.
The numbers don’t lie: six million fewer Democrats turned out to vote for Hillary Clinton than President Obama in 2012, and about 9.5 million fewer voters showed up for Clinton than Obama in 2008. There were several cities (Columbus, OH and Miami, according to the Wall Street Journal) where Clinton actually outperformed Obama’s bid four years ago, and exit polls also show Hillary made inroads with college educated whites living in suburbs, but ultimately these were inconsequential victories, as she underperformed in areas that had been Democratic strongholds for decades. Clinton drew 90,000 fewer votes in Michigan’s Wayne County than Obama did in 2012. She received 28,000 fewer votes in Philadelphia than Obama got during the last election. She counted 60,000 fewer votes in Milwaukee County than our current president took four years earlier.
This pattern, repeated in key battlegrounds across the Midwest, is what ultimately cost Clinton blue mainstays MI, PA and WI, allowing Donald Trump to redraw the electoral map by taking a larger share of what had been for years a shrinking electorate (rural white votes), where his nostalgic populism gained the most traction.
Incredibly, Trump — who was also a wildly unpopular candidate — was a victim of the same phenomenon: he managed to win the presidency though he received two million total fewer votes than Romney in 2012 and 1.5 million fewer votes than McCain in 2008. He even lost the popular vote to Clinton.
Sure, third-party tickets siphoned some votes from both candidates. Early CNN exit polls reported nine percent of voters ages 18-29 and eight percent of voters ages 30-44 said they voted for third parties in the election. But do the math: even when accounting for vanity votes, the shuttered polling sites and recent restrictions to the Voting Rights Act, you can’t account for a total missing deficit of eight million votes. So what went wrong? People simply didn’t show up.
Granted, the demographic breakdown of those who did vote was also puzzling. Women, who comprise about 52 percent of the electorate, were long believed to have been Clinton’s shoo-in. In the end, however, the percentage of female votes that ultimately went to Clinton was about ten points lower than most pre-vote polls predicted: 42 percent of all female voters cast their ballot for Trump, according to New York Times election poll exit stats released yesterday, and more than half of white women — 52 percent — voted for him, while only 43 percent voted for Clinton, according to CNN exit polls.
And despite all of his rhetoric regarding Mexican immigrants and a proposed border wall, the Times reported 29 percent of Latinos voted for Trump, which was more votes than Romney saw from this demographic — 27 percent — in 2012. None of this was what we expected. The media, the pollsters, the Democrats, the GOP: they all got it wrong.
So blame complacency, blame a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, blame the fact that many voters were forced to decide based not on which candidate they liked the most but which candidate they hated least. In the end, the turnout in this election cycle — where 46.9 percent of eligible voters didn’t even bother to show up — is perhaps reflective of our collective indifference in being forced to chose between a game show host and a member of the old guard establishment. What it does not reflect is the palpable mode of panic that’s riddled the nation for the past three days now that we’re forced to confront the reality of a Trump presidency.Where was your sense of urgency when we were collecting votes?[That's a damn good question...I wonder how many of the marchers, shouters and road blockers didn't bother to get their asses to the polls...the vote numbers suggest it was quite a few...]
We only have ourselves to blame for what happened Tuesday. As it turns out, maybe we do get the leaders we deserve.
Trump partisans want to claim that he won because of the legions of additional voters he brought in, but that narrative is shown irrefutably to be false by the fact that he garnered fewer votes than Mitt Romney...
(I saw Reince Preibus a couple of days ago crowing about how the RNC had learned from Romney's "mistakes" and created an extremely effective get-out-the-vote operation...I throw the bullshit flag Reince...If your operation was so great, why did it produce fewer votes then the much maligned Romney campaign?)
And some Democratic partisans want to try and blame the huge drop-off in Democratic votes on "voter suppression" laws. But as the numbers cited in the article clearly demonstrate, when you look at both the total overall drop-off in votes, and also drill down to look at where these lower vote totals occurred in the critical states, (For example, Hillary got 90,000 fewer votes in Wayne County Michigan...where Detroit is located...then Obama did, and she lost Michigan by only 13,000 votes) this explanation is no more supported by the data than Reince's claims about the great GOP voter turnout machine. Increased restrictions on early voting can't possibly explain more than a tiny fraction of the overall drop, and the drop was most critical in places where the voting laws were exactly the same as they had been in 2012.
No, the bottom line is this. The numbers clearly, inescapably and irrefutably show that the reason Hillary Clinton lost this election is because millions of people who had turned out to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 for whatever reason (maybe some of them thought she had it in the bag so they didn't have to bother, maybe some of the Bernie Bros didn't find her ideologically pure enough to be worthy of their votes) made the proactive, affirmative decision not to show up to vote for Hillary Clinton. Period.
And now a lot of them are out marching in the streets, but when they could really have made the difference, they were nowhere to be found...
And now they, and we, and the whole country will have to live with the consequences of their failure to show up when it really mattered.
