Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's experimental mechanized corps overruns the Noonan forces:
Daily Kos: Peggy Noonan mocked data nerds who won the presidency: Peggy Noonan, as wrong as the rest of her ilk, on how President Barack Obama didn't seem "genuine" back in July:
Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don't care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat…. Mr. Obama... isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."
This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?
Of course, this was a calculated effort to combat the notion that Mitt Romney was cold and aloof and didn't give a shit about people who weren't members of his country club (and maybe not even them). You think Romney is aloof, well what about Obama? He hired statisticians to employ gay math!
Romney Political Director Rich Beeson reports that Romney won the election--but that that wizard Nate Silver magically altered the electorate:
Katrina Trenko: Romney Political Director: ‘The Ground Game Worked Fine’: Rich Beeson, the political director for the Romney campaign, says that the problem wasn’t the GOP get-out-the-vote efforts…. “We turned out the groups we needed to on our side,” Beeson says…. Democrats “did… alter the electorate.”…
“We hit the numbers we needed to hit. Our ground game turned out the people it needed to turnout…"
Fred Barnes confidently predicts that General Steiner--excuse me, the white vote--will rescue them:
The Democrats’ success was Obamacentric: America is a center-right country…. Yes, a solid majority favors higher taxes for the rich. That’s been true since the dawn of man. More telling in the exit poll was the verdict on Obamacare. Forty-nine percent said it should be repealed in whole or in part. Forty-four percent said it should be expanded or left as is. And just wait until it’s imposed on all of us in 2014. That will be backlash time….
The electorate has given Republicans two more advantages. One is the white vote. Its share of the electorate is shrinking, but slowly. Whites are the nation’s dominant voting bloc today and will be for many elections to come. In 2008, 74 percent of voters were white. That percentage might have held in 2012 as well, if millions of white voters from 2008 hadn’t stayed away from the polls last week…. [T]he white vote is a Republican stronghold…. In 2012, Obama’s white support fell to 39 percent… only 42 percent of white women…
Byron York rails against the deserters:
Byron York:
York: In Ohio, the GOP puzzles over missing white voters: Out in the field, the Republicans actually involved in the election are talking about… why a large group of voters, carefully cultivated through personal contacts and putative supporters of Mitt Romney, just didn't show…. Republicans faced two big problems. The first is that a lot of black voters turned out. The second is that a lot of white voters didn't….
What does all this have to do with a conservative cocoon? Not much. The missing voters certainly weren't in the cocoon, and there's no evidence the Romney campaign ignored those voters because conservative media told them the election was already in the bag. Just the opposite; Romney chased them hard…. Developing a clear idea of why Romney lost is important because it will help Republicans fix the things that need to be fixed -- and not blow up the party if there are less radical solutions.
