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Thursday Night Story: Sundays at Rocco's

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goddamnedfrank11/16/2012 2:26:28 am PST
Mitt Romney says he is a numbers guy, but in the end he got the numbers wrong. His campaign was adamant that public polls in the swing states were mistaken. They claimed the pollsters were over-estimating the number of Democrats who would turn out on Election Day. Romney’s campaign was certain that minorities would not show up for Obama in 2012 the way they did in 2008. “It just defied logic,” said a top aide of the idea that Obama could match, let alone exceed, his performance with minorities from the last election. When anyone raised the idea that public polls were showing a close race, the campaign’s pollster said the poll modeling was flawed and everyone moved on. Internally, the campaign’s own polling—tweaked to represent their view of the electorate, with fewer Democrats—showed a steady uptick for Romney since the first debate. Even on the morning of the election, Romney’s senior advisers weren’t close to hedging. They said he was going to win “decisively.” It seemed like spin, but the Boston Globe reports that a fireworks display was already ordered for the victory. Romney and Ryan thought they were going to win, say aides. “We were optimistic. More than just cautiously optimistic,” says one campaign staffer. When Romney lost, “it was like a death in the family.”

Thank God these assholes didn’t win and will never govern. I’m Whitey McWhite Guy here and I all but knew that black turnout was going to be high in this election, and for one simple reason. Since Obama had already proven once that he could get enough white people to vote for him to be elected President, even the most disaffected and cynical of supporters no longer had any excuse for staying home on the theory that he couldn’t possibly win. Many people inclined to vote for him but for whatever reason hadn’t the first time around were motivated to on their final opportunity to fix that.

The saddest are those who bet against a high minority turnout, who tried to tell us that it would be down this year, for no other stated reason than because that’s what they wanted, what they needed to win. I don’t think you need any kind of special insight into the modern minority experience or how people of other ethnic groups view the world to understand that they are people and that people, in general, are not going to roll over simply because you want them to.