The Data is There GOP, Will You Use It or Ignore It?...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny

As the republican party looks to rebuild the question is; will it understand the reason(s) for its 2012 election loss to a very vulnerable incumbent? Or, will it seek to make excuses and hang on to the old order? Hopefully smarter heads like Governor Jindal will gain control of the republican party power levers and steady a badly faltering party.

NationalJournal - In the weeks before Election Day, both Republicans and Democrats were nervous about their poll numbers. Both sides of the aisle have smart pollsters, they reasoned, so how could the numbers that Democrats were seeing diverge so sharply from the numbers the Republicans were seeing? Deep down, I wrote at the time, both parties secretly worried that their side was missing the boat.

Now we know which side needed its polls unskewed. 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 on the right.

"Everyone thought the election was going to be close. How did [Republicans] not know we were going to get our ass kicked?" lamented Rob Jesmer, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "I don't understand how we didn't know. That's the part that's most puzzling and frustrating and embarrassing."

The underlying causes of the errant numbers are the assumptions that the pollsters made about the nature of the electorate. Most pollsters believed the electorate would look something like the voters who turned out in 2008, just with slightly lower numbers of African-Americans, younger people, and Hispanics heading to the polls.

But exit polls actually showed a much more diverse electorate than the one forecast. Black turnout stayed consistent with 2008, Hispanic turnout was up, and younger voters made up a higher percentage of the electorate than they had four years ago. White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate, according to the exits, down 2 points from 2008 and a continuation of the two-decade long decline in their share of the electorate.

That meant that even though Mitt Romney scored 59 percent of the white vote -- a higher percentage than George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004, higher than Ronald Reagan in 1980 and matching George H.W. Bush's 1988 score, when he won 426 electoral votes in 40 states -- it wasn't enough to overcome the 80 percent support that Obama scored among nonwhite voters. {Read More}

The conservative principles of fiscally responsible government plays well with responsible people. The GOP will simply have to find a way to market this principle and significantly increase the size of its tent by recognizing the socon and neocon agenda needs to be jettisoned. At least in their present state.

Via: Memeorabdum