re: #476 Ian G.

National Review tears are the best.

I mean, Freepers and WND and the like are fine and all, but I love reading through the “sophisticated” opinions of people like Mark Steyn, David Gelernter, and Kathryn Jean Lopez. They’re just as delusional as your typical Freeper, it’s just that they use bigger words and spend more time stroking their own egos.

Lopez isn’t delusional, and there’s a lot of good stuff on NR today. Here, have some:

This election was more than just a race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, more than just a battle between liberalism and conservatism. It was a race between two different visions of what the American electorate looks like. Democrats saw the race through the lens of the “emerging Democratic majority.” Rising numbers of minority voters — and a corresponding declining white vote — meant that Democrats were playing with the wind at their backs. Add to that young voters, upscale professionals, and single women, and you have a pretty durable coalition that could push President Obama across the finish line despite the stagnant economy.

On the other hand, Republicans saw this as a “Silent Majority” election. They were trying to refight the 1980s, putting together the political coalition that gave the country the Reagan Revolution: evangelicals, working-class white Catholic “Reagan Democrats,” small businessmen, and rural voters. Conservative pundits kept saying that polls were wrong because they oversampled Democrats and ignored Republican enthusiasm. They seemed to argue that the polls were missing potential GOP voters who would show up on Election Day and oust Obama.

Unfortunately, we can now safely say which vision won in yesterday’s election. There was no silent majority of right-leaning voters to take Romney across the finish line. The white vote continued to decline, from 74 percent in 2008 to 72 percent in 2012, while the Hispanic vote went from around 7 percent to around 10 percent. Exit polls showed that women were 53 percent of the electorate this time around. Obama had an 11-point lead among women, while Romney had only a 7-point lead among men.

Republicans misunderstood the enthusiasm they were seeing among Romney supporters. It’s true that there was a great deal of energy on the GOP side, as seen by the large crowds Romney attracted to his campaign events. However, your base can be as energized as possible, but if it is a declining percentage of the overall electorate, there is not much that you can do.