whembly wrote:


The issue I'm seeing in my lifetime is "compromise" is an art that's been neglected. There are truly some "win-win" proposition if both sides just "give a little" to the other side. But no, it's been more of a Thunderdome environment in the arena of politics. *shrugs* Maybe I'm being naive...

gorgon wrote:
Have you considered what it would mean if life began at inception?

 Easy E wrote:
However, the polling data up until election day was pretty clear, Romney had no real chance based on the Electoral College map. If you believed otherwise, you were participating in self-delusion.

First and possibly foremost, stuff happens. In this case it was a hurricane. Sandy kept Mitt Romney off TV for five crucial days, days which, without Sandy, would almost certainly have seen Romney’s lead solidify and grow.
Instead, Barack Obama had a rare (and rarely taken) chance to look truly presidential, for the entire last week of the campaign, with zero competition. He did take it, aided indelibly by visuals of a certain portly Republican firebrand governor fawning all over his presidential greatness.

Which is the second half of this lesson: Sandy may have put Obama over the top. It may also have relegated Chris Christie to the list of also-rans.

gorgon wrote:
I don't believe that it does, but I recognize that someone who feels that way *logically* has a right to be pretty darn upset about the practice. It's very easy for a pro-choice individual to discuss abortion in a detached way, and to say things like "if you don't like abortion, don't have one." The other side just sees murdered children on an epic scale, and thus their strong feelings and (non-violent) actions seem pretty legit to me, even if my personal belief is that they're in error.

gorgon wrote:
Civil conversation is a nice start, but I don't think one can dismiss the emotion from every topic. If our society is to become less polarized, I think real attempts to understand why people feel the way they do are a necessary part of the process. Heck, I make fun of the Tea Partiers just like a lot of people, but maybe our goal should be to understand that all their emotion isn't just manufactured...those citizens are going through something that they feel is impacting them in a very real way.

gorgon wrote:
Note that I'm not trying to jump down your throat on this, it's just that your comment got me thinking about the topic.

It was a National Wave ..

As of this moment, Barack Obama has defeated Mitt Romney by a popular vote margin of over three million votes, 50.7% to 47.9%, a slightly greater margin than George Bush defeated John Kerry by in 2004. That margin should continue to grow as provisional ballots are counted across the country, and the more than 3 million votes remaining in California are counted.

More impressive for Obama, and ominous for Republicans, is the electoral college numbers, and Mitt Romney’s failure to make any real headway. In 2004, despite a popular margin of 2.4%, Bush was dependent on a 118,000 vote margin in Ohio, 2.1%, to eke out a 286-252 victory in the electoral college.

This year, Ohio scarcely mattered. Despite the focus on Ohio, an obsession that lasted well-into election-night, even a Romney victory in Ohio would not have mattered. Obama had already won the electoral college, and done so by more than his national margin in Wisconsin(6.7 points), Nevada(6.6 points), Iowa(5.6 points) Colorado(4.7 points), Virginia(3 points). Those states alone would provided Obama with a 291-247 lead in the electoral college. Even the loss of Virginia would still have resulted in a narrow Obama victory, 278-260. Romney would have needed to somehow have won Colorado, which he lost 51.2-46.5, in order to win the election.

In fact all of this was moot. In the end, the only state’s Mitt Romney gained were Indiana, which had been conceded at the beginning of the year, and North Carolina which despite repeated claims that it was “baked”, was decided by a 2% margin.

In the Senate, it was almost equally a clean sweep. Republican hopes for gains evaporated. Linda McMahon, who had led for most of the summer, lost by 12 points in Connecticut, while other Republican challengers, Linda Lingle in Hawaii, Connie Mack in Florida, and Josh Mandel in Florida also fell short. Even in deep red North Dakota, nearly written off at the beginning of the year as an automatic Republican pickup , Republican Congressman Rick Berg fell short. The only competitive Senate races won by Republicans were in Nevada, where an exceptionally weak Democratic candidate dogged by corruption allegations lost to Republican incumbent Dean Heller by a single percentage point, and in Arizona, where late-counting should bring Richard Carmona within less than three points.

But Gerrymandering Held…..

There seems to be a tendency among commentators, while simultaneously focusing on the demographics behind Barak Obama’s victory and the difficulties they pose for the GOP going forward, to claim that the election was nevertheless a split decision. After all, the Republicans maintained control of the US House of Representatives, despite some of the lowest approval ratings in history.

To accept this analysis is to miss what happened Tuesday night. Not only did Barack Obama win a commanding majority in the Electoral College, but Democratic senate candidates swept almost every competitive race, winning 25 out of 33 seats up for grabs, and only narrowly hold Arizona and Nevada. Five of these victories occurred in states Mitt Romney won, two of them in states where his margin of victory was over 20 points.

What saved the Republican House Majority was not any sort of split decision on the part of voters, but rather their good fortune to have had their best year since 1920 in 2010, allowing them to redraw congressional maps nationwide. In North Carolina, Democrats carried a majority of the congressional vote, 2.22 million to 2.14 million, but Republicans won 9 seats to the Democrats 3, with one Democratically-held seat going to a recount. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republicans appear to have lost the popular vote as well, but won majorities of 9-5 and 13-5 respectively in those delegations. Republicans won the popular vote in Ohio 53-47, but only because no votes were included from an 83% Obama seat where the incumbent went unopposed. They won 12 out of 16 seats in the congressional delegation. In total, without winning the popular vote, Republicans managed a 41-17.

Gerrymandering is of course not just a Republican sport. Democratic maps in Maryland and Illinois resulted in 7-1 and 12-6 splits respectively, with latter involving a gain of four seats for Democrats and a loss of five for the Republicans. And Democrats had a good night in California where a non-partisan map replaced a bipartisan gerrymander. But the Republicans controlled far more legislatures and in the end the House was not close. Nor, in fact, were many of the legislatures were lines were drawn. Republicans increased their legislative majorities in Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and held on to lopsided margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

The House is Secure for the Decade, but that is a mixed blessing for the Republican Party

As noted earlier, the Republican Party’s triumph in its efforts to maintain control of the US House of Representatives had more to do with favorable maps than the intent of the voters. With most of the vote in, Democrats and Republicans are almost tied in votes cast, 55,962,439 for Democrats to 55,786,017 for the Republicans. Nonetheless, Republicans are likely to control 54% of the seats.

The Republican victory is if anything more complete, as their majority was never in particular doubt. If the Republicans had lost every race where they took less than 52% of the vote, they would still control the House by a 224-211 margin. By contrast if the Democrats lost every race where they took less than 52%, the result would be a 248-187 Republican majority. In effect Democrats have maxed out their number of likely targets outside of a major wave.

The very security of the Republican majority is not an unmitigated benefit. While securing Republicans a seat at the table of the federal government for the next decade, the very fact that Republicans can likely expect to hold the US House without majority support means that House Republicans have very little incentive to attempt to reach out beyond the 47% or so of the vote they need to maintain a majority. Whereas the Republican party as a whole is focused on winning over young voters and Hispanics, the very concentration of these demographics in urban areas means they play little role in the outcome of house elections even within the few swing districts that are left. Far more important are the rapidly reddening Appalachian districts where Obama underperformed his 2008 performance which was already an underperformance of Kerry’s 2004 results.

As a consequence, House Republicans do not face the same need to reach out beyond the party’s core constituencies that their Senate colleagues face, much less whoever is nominated for the Presidency in 2016. At the same time, given their position in the majority, they will be the branch of the party that will take the lead on policy for the next two years at the very least.

On a state level, a similar situation prevails. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock could not have damaged Mitt Romney and the party as a whole quite so thoroughly had their run-ins with the abortion issue not occurred in the context of efforts by Republican state legislatures to aggressively target access to abortion, including an intrusive ultra-sound requirement passed by the Virginia state legislature. Yet while both the party’s presidential nominee and its senate candidates arguably suffered as a result of these laws, the results for Republican legislators tended to vary based on their control of redistricting. In states where they were unable to draw the lines, New England, the West Coast, Colorado, and Iowa, they suffered either wipeouts or heavy losses. Yet of the states where they drew the lines, only in New Hampshire and New York did they suffer losses. In Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and most of the West and South they increased their majorities. In Pennsylvania and Michigan they suffered only minor losses despite Obama winning both states comfortably.

As Republicans at both the state and federal level become less dependent on swing or democratic voters, they will in turn become more dependent on their own, and the challenges posed by primaries. This will incentivize a drive to the Right, and undermine efforts to moderate, especially if Republicans have a good year in 2014.

Voter ID Laws and Restrictions on Early Voting Backfired on the GOP

In the lead-up to the 2012 election, the battle over how votes would be cast was as brutal in many states as the battle for votes. Having badly lost the early voting battle in 2008, many Republican legislatures moved to curtail early voting availability in 2012, including eliminating weekend voting in Florida and Ohio. Many African American Churches ran “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives in 2008 after Sunday services, and such efforts were perceived in many quarters as an effort to disrupt Democratic GOTV efforts in 2012. Many states paired these laws with additional requirements for photo ids to be presented in order to vote and aggressive purges of non-voters from the voting rolls.

Democrats reacted with outrage, with anger particularly concentrated among African American leaders who claimed that such policies were a deliberate effort to disenfranchise minority voters. MSNBC ran extensive coverage of “Republican Voter-Suppression” efforts that the term entered the lexicon of the election, and Al Sharpton devoted an hour a day to ranting on Republican efforts to return to Jim Crow. They declared that Voter ID laws and the purges of non-voters were efforts to prevent Hispanic and African American voters from voting.

These charges are unfair. While restricting Early Voting on Sundays probably had as a motivation disrupting Democratic campaign efforts, the main reason for these laws was less that Republican leaders wanted them than that Republican voters demanded them and their leaders obliged. Regardless of whether widespread fraud was ever a problem, the fact is that a large number of Republican voters believed that it existed, and Republican leaders learned in 2010 what happened to Republican elected officials who ignored their constituents.

In the end the both the charges and the immediate consequences of the laws were minimal. Because fraud was generally not a problem, voter purges in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio had little to no impact on the election because the dead voters removed from the rolls tended to be non-voters in any case. The best example of this occurred in Cuyahoga County in Ohio. An aggressive purge of the voter rolls by the state reduced them from 1.1 million to just over 900,000, but overall turnout remained largely the same. Voter id laws, where implemented, had little effect. African American turnout in Georgia had increased in every year since they were implemented in 2006, and this trend continued in 2012.

Yet if the laws themselves had little consequence, the battle over them was a different matter. Just as perception was more important than reality among Republican voters, the same was true among Hispanic and African American voters, who viewed the laws as an attack on their voting rights. These views seemed confirmed when efforts to get around shortened early voting hours, and the elimination of Sunday voting, resulted in massive lines. In Florida, media coverage for the final week before the election was dominated by lines that averaged more than 3 hours in south Florida, and on Saturday reached 7 hours in Miami-Dade county. Democrats turned the lines into impromptu rallies, summoning speakers, distributing water bottles, and playing movies. In effect, the lines became a mobilizing tool for bringing minority voters to the polls.

Lines and energy are infectious. Had there been no efforts to purge illegal aliens from the voter rolls in Florida, or efforts to restrict early voting, there would still have been lines, but those lines would not have immediately been blamed on a nefarious Republican plot. In the end, the Republican Party probably lost at least ten voters for every fraudulent vote eliminated or voter discouraged from the polls.

Republican Outreach is unlikely to be successful until the party becomes tolerant of Dissent

In the aftermath of the election Republicans are already discussing ways of reaching out to Hispanics and young voters. Most of these suggestions focus on policies that the party can adopt, whether involving some form of support for immigration reform, or abandoning opposition to same-sex marriage.

The problem with these suggestions is that they imply a misunderstanding of the problem the Republican party faces. The problem the party has is not based on hostility to either Hispanic, gay or young individuals per se, but rather on hostility to anyone not within the party. During my years with the College Republicans I never once encountered a lack of individual tolerance for diversity of backgrounds. In fact, few organizations at the University level in the United States are so quick to welcome racial minorities. What the organization however lacked was any sort of tolerance for political dissent. A substantial level of internal tolerance was paired with hostility towards Democrats and Democratic voters to such an extent that often the leadership attempted to force members to choose between friends within and without the organization, with social interaction with those outside of it often viewed with suspicion and implications of disloyalty.

Because the party is in its current form an ideological entity, Republicans view themselves as correct, and people who disagree as either stupid or malevolent. This does not present a challenge when recruiting white voters, since many can function largely within Republican social groups or exist sufficiently at the fringe of political involvement to avoid the drawbacks. When recruiting minorities however it does.

The simple fact is that even with substantial outreach efforts, Republicans are highly unlikely to win a majority of Hispanics, African Americans, Gays, or young voters in the near future. As a consequence, Republican voting members of these groups will have a majority of acquaintances, friends, and relatives voting for Democratic candidates, and odds are that a vast majority of those they interact with on a daily basis will vote for Democrats. Demonizing Democratic voters, means demonizing these friends, family members, and acquaintances, and therefore will continue to serve to alienate these groups from the party, reducing its minority support to those willing to cut themselves off from their own communities. After all, who are voters likely to listen to? Distant and abstract political figures spouting rhetoric, or those they know?

As a consequence, Republican rhetorical criticism of the African American community for its bloc voting for Democrats, suggestions that that Hispanics and African Americans are welfare cheats, and opposition to gay rights tends to undermine Republican support among members of those subgroups who are not any of the above categories and in fact are likely to agree with Republicans on political issues. Any Republican breakthrough with minority voters is therefore likely to be dependent on making it socially acceptable within those communities for individuals to vote Republican.

gorgon wrote:

 labmouse42 wrote:
Look at our discussion on abortion for example. Instead of ranting and raving, we simply disagreed on when the definition of 'life' began. Most rational discussions about policy can be broken down to core elements like that.

Have you considered what it would mean if life began at inception?

I don't believe that it does, but I recognize that someone who feels that way *logically* has a right to be pretty darn upset about the practice. It's very easy for a pro-choice individual to discuss abortion in a detached way, and to say things like "if you don't like abortion, don't have one." The other side just sees murdered children on an epic scale, and thus their strong feelings and (non-violent) actions seem pretty legit to me, even if my personal belief is that they're in error.

Civil conversation is a nice start, but I don't think one can dismiss the emotion from every topic. If our society is to become less polarized, I think real attempts to understand why people feel the way they do are a necessary part of the process. Heck, I make fun of the Tea Partiers just like a lot of people, but maybe our goal should be to understand that all their emotion isn't just manufactured...those citizens are going through something that they feel is impacting them in a very real way.

Note that I'm not trying to jump down your throat on this, it's just that your comment got me thinking about the topic.

 reds8n wrote:
http://www.iaindale.com/posts/five-takeaways-from-the-election

TheHammer wrote:
If you look at a set of numbers from one poll and question it, sure, you can be skeptical and rational.

If you have dozens of polls from a multitude of polling firms and still remain skeptical then you are probably a little bit crazy! Or, at the very least, in need of a remedial statistics class so you understand how samples are created.

It was wildly apparent to all but the most deluded partisan that Obama had this sewn up for months. I'm still waiting for biccat to make good on our bet about it, in fact (where is that guy?). The only chance Romney had was that the science of polling had some fundamental flaw that was not accounted for, and it was a flaw that benefited Romney exclusively.

The one thing this election has done is give us a great list of people to ignore when issues such as climate change or the economy are discussed: if they refuse to acknowledge simple polling than how can we trust them to think rationally about subjects that are more complex?

 reds8n wrote:
http://www.iaindale.com/posts/five-takeaways-from-the-election

But Gerrymandering Held…..

I really hate this practice with a passion. I wish more voters realized the importance and impact of Gerrymandering. I have a feeling the first election after a census would be a bit different if voters actually knew what was at stake.

A few states have adopted systems where computers create the districts based on population, symetrical borders, and area. In some states, the courts decide ont he final map. Either system is better than letting the actual political party in power draw the map.

This system leads to gridlock and failure to compromise. If my seat is secure, I have no reason to compromise and every reason to pander to my base's worst instincts.

 streamdragon wrote:

gorgon wrote:
Have you considered what it would mean if life began at inception?

I'm going to assume you mean "conception" here. Because if life began at inception, well... that would be confusing.

Earth to GOP: Get a Grip Conservatives should demand IQ tests of Republican candidates.By BRET STEPHENSLike this columnist ..Article Comments (188) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.1EmailPrintSave ↓ More .
.
smaller Larger In January I was rebuked by some readers for predicting that the GOP would lose, and for saying it deserved to lose, too.

"It doesn't matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing," I wrote. "All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won't be another fiasco. But they can't be reasonably sure, so it's going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know."

I quote these lines less to boast about my prescience than to establish some credibility for what I'm about to say.

Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.

Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.

Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have done better by adopting former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a "truce" on social issues.

By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice.

Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the candidate stood in the way.

On the subject of idiocy, can someone explain where's the political gold in demonizing Latin American immigrants? California's Prop 187, passed in 1994, helped destroy the GOP in a once-reliable state. Yet Republicans have been trying to replicate that fiasco on a national scale ever since.

If the argument is that illegal immigrants are overtaxing the welfare state, then that's an argument for paring back the welfare state, not deporting 12 million people. If the argument is that these immigrants "steal" jobs, then that's an argument by someone who either doesn't understand the free market or aspires for his children to become busboys and chambermaids.

And if the argument is that these immigrants don't share our values, then religiosity, hard work, personal stoicism and the sense of family obligation expressed through billions of dollars in remittances aren't American values.

Here's another suggestion: Running for president should be undertaken only by those with a reasonable chance of winning a general election. It should not be seen as an opportunity to redeem a political reputation or audition for a gig on Fox News. Mitt Romney won the nomination for the simple reason that every other contender was utterly beyond the pale of national acceptability, except Michele Bachmann.

Just kidding.

Though conservatives put themselves through the paces of trying to like Mr. Romney, he was never a natural standard bearer for the GOP. He was, instead, a consensus politician in the mold of Jerry Ford and George H.W. Bush; a technocrat who loved to "wallow in data"; a plutocrat with a fatal touch of class guilt. His campaign was a study in missed opportunities, punctuated by 90 brilliant minutes in Denver. Like a certain Massachusetts governor who preceded him, he staked his presidential claims on "competence." But Americans want inspiration from their presidents.

Mr. Romney was never likely to deliver on that score. And though I have my anxieties about the president's next term, I also have a hunch the GOP dodged a bullet with Mr. Romney's loss.

It dodged a bullet because a Romney victory would have obscured deeper trends in American politics the GOP must take into account. A Romney administration would also have been politically cautious and ideologically defensive in a way that rarely serves the party well.

Finally, the GOP dodged ownership of the second great recession, which will inevitably hit when the Federal Reserve can no longer float the economy in pools of free money. When that happens, Barack Obama won't have George W. Bush to kick around.

So get a grip, Republicans: Our republican experiment in self-government didn't die last week. But a useful message has been sent to a party that spent too much of the past four years listening intently to echoes of itself. Change the channel for a little while.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

 Frazzled wrote:
Rarely do I agree with an opinion piece so much. This is a good place to post:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324894104578114791679213644.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Yes. There is a lot of sense in his article.

If Republicans would just ditch the extreme issues on abortion and so on, they and Democrats would find a lot less water in between their parties.

 Seaward wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Yes. There is a lot of sense in his article.

If Republicans would just ditch the extreme issues on abortion and so on, they and Democrats would find a lot less water in between their parties.

Why would anyone vote for slightly stingier Democrats?

 d-usa wrote:
Maybe congress will quit hiding behind "I wanted to do my job, but papa Obama didn't make me so it is his fault!" Not likely though...

 Seaward wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Yes. There is a lot of sense in his article.

If Republicans would just ditch the extreme issues on abortion and so on, they and Democrats would find a lot less water in between their parties.

Why would anyone vote for slightly stingier Democrats?

 d-usa wrote:
Doesn't the constitution place the origin of revenue bills in the house? Or are they only strict constitutionalist when they are not trying to avoid responsibility or trying to blame the other party for not doing their job?

PhantomViper wrote:

gorgon wrote:

 labmouse42 wrote:
Look at our discussion on abortion for example. Instead of ranting and raving, we simply disagreed on when the definition of 'life' began. Most rational discussions about policy can be broken down to core elements like that.

Have you considered what it would mean if life began at inception?

I don't believe that it does, but I recognize that someone who feels that way *logically* has a right to be pretty darn upset about the practice. It's very easy for a pro-choice individual to discuss abortion in a detached way, and to say things like "if you don't like abortion, don't have one." The other side just sees murdered children on an epic scale, and thus their strong feelings and (non-violent) actions seem pretty legit to me, even if my personal belief is that they're in error.

Civil conversation is a nice start, but I don't think one can dismiss the emotion from every topic. If our society is to become less polarized, I think real attempts to understand why people feel the way they do are a necessary part of the process. Heck, I make fun of the Tea Partiers just like a lot of people, but maybe our goal should be to understand that all their emotion isn't just manufactured...those citizens are going through something that they feel is impacting them in a very real way.

Note that I'm not trying to jump down your throat on this, it's just that your comment got me thinking about the topic.

I have a slight problem with those people and their actual motives.

My problem is that the US currently has one of the worst rate of mortality amongst children in the developed world. Shouldn't those people that are so concerned about "murdered abortion babies" do something about this before worrying about the zygote's right to life?

 d-usa wrote:
So the Frazzled plan is that the house doesn't actually make a budget like the constitution says it should, instead papa Obama should do the work for them?

 d-usa wrote:
So the Frazzled plan is that the house doesn't actually make a budget like the constitution says it should, instead papa Obama should do the work for them?

 d-usa wrote:
Doesn't the constitution place the origin of revenue bills in the house? Or are they only strict constitutionalist when they are not trying to avoid responsibility or trying to blame the other party for not doing their job?

 AustonT wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Doesn't the constitution place the origin of revenue bills in the house? Or are they only strict constitutionalist when they are not trying to avoid responsibility or trying to blame the other party for not doing their job?

I believe the House has passed a budget resolution every year. I know for sure that a budget resolution was passed in 2011 and March of this year.
So I guess I'm not seeing your point.
The Senate on the other hand hasn't passed a budget resolution since August of 2009. And Harry Ried has publicly stated he wont even bring them to the floor to be voted on.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
All first world countries such as the USA, Japan, UK, and France, collect epidemiological data to a satisfactory standard to enable useful information to be developed.