Conspiracy Theory Update: The IRS Stole the Election From Mitt Romney
Today, Stan Veuger of AEI, a recently minted PhD apparently trying to make a name for himself, presents yet another theory. Tea party groups, he says, presented an “existential threat” to Obama’s reelection, and it turns out that failing to approve their tax-exempt status “would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle.” His paper examines how rainfall affected attendance at tea party rallies, and how that in turn affected Republican turnout in the 2010 election. If you then assume that 2012 was just like 2010, and that jitters over tax status dramatically affected tea party effectiveness, it turns out that Obama stole the 2012 election from Romney! Specifically, “had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”
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