Comparison Of 2016 Vs. 2012 Group Support In Election

The chart above was made from information provided by the Pew Research Center. The positive numbers show the margin of support for groups voting for Hillary Clinton, and the negative numbers show the margin of support for groups voting for Donald Trump.

Note that the support for in Clinton was down from the support Barack Obama got in 2012. Donald Trump also outperformed what Mitt Romney did in 2012, but by smaller margins. For whatever reason, Democrats simply did not turn out in large enough numbers for Clinton. If they had the same turnout Obama got in 2012 (or close to it), Clinton would have won.

YouGov Poll Says 2016 Election Will Resemble 2012 Election

The YouGov Poll has questioned over 72,000 respondents in the last couple of weeks. The results are represented in the charts and map above. They believe Clinton will defeat Trump in the electoral college by a 294 to 244 vote. They say the charts below the map show that the results of the 2016 election will closely resemble the outcome of the 2012 election -- that those who voted for Obama will vote for Clinton, and those who voted for Romney will vote for Trump.

Texas Sets A New Record In Registered Voters

Some political pundits are telling us that the voters are turned off by this election, and the presidential candidates each party has chosen. The chart above shows that is simply not true.

The state of Texas has set a new record in the number of registered voters. The current tally is 15,100,824. That's a jump in registration of 1,454,598 (about 11%). And that's not a normal increase in registered voters. The number in 2012 was only 71,164 over 2008 (a rise of only 0.005%).

Whatever voters may think of the candidates, they are paying extraordinary attention to this election, and I believe there will be a huge turnout this year -- probably a record turnout.

NYT Electoral College Map Has Clinton Winning 347 Votes

The electoral college map above is from The Upshot blog in the New York Times. It predicts the 2016 election will be the same as the 2012 election -- with one exception. North Carolina, which went for Romney in 2012, will go for Clinton in 2016. That would give Hillary Clinton 347 electoral college votes -- 77 votes over the 270 votes required for her to be elected.

Donald Trump likes to say that Mitt Romney "choked" in 2012, but right now it looks like Trump will do even worse than Romney did.

Trump Leads Clinton By Only 6 Points In New Texas Poll

These charts were made from a newly-released Public Policy Polling survey -- done between August 12th and 14th of a random sample of 944 likely Texas voters, and has a margin of error of 3.2 points.

The poll shows Donald Trump has a 6 point lead over Hillary Clinton in Texas. That may seem like a lot, but it's the smallest margin any Republican presidential candidate has had in the Lone Star State in a long time -- and 10% of Texas voters are still undecided.

Texas is still a solidly red state, and Trump will probably carry it in November -- but that's not a sure thing, like it has been in the past. Note the bottom chart, which shows the comparison of 2016 to the way the 2008 and 2012 elections came out in Texas. In 2008, the Republican candidate (John McCain) won by 11 points, and in 2012 the Republican candidate (Mitt Romney) won by 16 points.

Texans, like other Americans, aren't real sure that Trump is fit to be president (and currently has only 44% support). I may be crazy, but I think if young voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters, and women turn out in large numbers in November, Hillary Clinton has an outside chance of winning Texas. It certainly wouldn't hurt for her to make some trips to Texas.

Majority Says Trump Is A Danger To Their Way Of Life

The chart above is from results of a new Monmouth University Poll -- done between August 4th and 7th of a random national sample of 803 registered voters, with a margin of error of 3.5 points.

This is a punch in the gut for Donald Trump. It turns out that a clear majority (54%) say he is a danger to the American way of life (only 7 points less than the percentage saying islamic terrorists pose a danger). It's going to be very difficult for him to win in November with a majority of Americans thinking he is dangerous.

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That same poll asked about job approval for the president and Congress. As usual, the president scored much higher than Congress -- about 42 points higher (56% to 14% approval). The president also had a 38 point lower disapproval rating.

U.S. Should Do Away With The Obsolete Electoral College

The United States sells itself as the bastion of true democracy. And in the governmental systems it has imposed on other countries (like Iraq and Afghanistan), it has trumpeted the democratic concept of "one man - one vote". Unfortunately, the United States doesn't practice what it preaches. Because "one man - one vote" is a foreign concept in U.S. presidential elections. Instead, our president's are chosen by an Electoral College -- with the number of electors for each state being equal to the number of senators and representatives that state has.

This system has several flaws. One flaw is that it is possible for a presidential candidate to win the Electoral College vote and become president, while losing the popular vote to his opponent. This has happened several times in our election history (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), making a joke of the "one man - one vote" concept.

Another flaw is that it causes many votes to be worthless, and not counted in picking a president. If a person votes for a candidate that does not win their state, then their vote is meaningless (since the other candidate will receive all electoral votes from that state). The only votes that matter in a state are those cast for the candidate who wins that state.

And there is a third flaw that I had not considered before. Ryan Cooper in The Week points out that even if a person votes for the winner in their state, their vote may not count as much (have the same weight) as a vote cast for the winner in another state. He divided the number of eligible voters in each state by the number of electors (in the Electoral College) that state has -- and discovered that it takes a lot more votes per elector in some states than in other states. You can go here to see his charts and a discussion of his results.

He has a point. It takes far less votes per elector for some states, and that means each citizen vote cast in those states carries more weight than a citizen vote cast in another state. I took Cooper's idea one step further and did some computations to show just how much weight each vote carried in each state in the 2012 presidential election. I divided the number of votes the winning candidate in each state got by the number of electors in that state. The result showed a wide range in the value of a vote between the states -- and those results are shown in the two charts below.

This first chart shows the weight of each vote in the blue states -- votes cast for President Obama. If you voted for Romney in these states, then your vote didn't count at all. But note the huge difference in the value of a vote even for those who voted for the president.

And here is the result for those who voted for Mitt Romney in the red states (the states he won).

This is ridiculous, and it makes a mockery of our democracy. In a real democracy, every citizens vote should count exactly the same as that of every other citizen -- and that will never happen as long as we have the silly Electoral College. It is time to dump this archaic and obsolete system, and elect our president's by the popular vote -- with the person getting the most citizen votes being the winner.

Will Teabaggers Hurt Or Help GOP In The 2014 Election ?

There is no doubt that the teabaggers hurt the Republican Party in the 2012 election. They did that by controlling the GOP primary in many states and nominating some candidates whose extremism turned off voters. This caused the Republicans to lose some races they were originally favored to win. The operative question now is whether that will happen again in 2014?

Establishment Republicans are making a serious effort to head off any teabagger opponents this year. While they may not say it publicly, they know they must have candidates that can appeal to moderate Independent voters or 2014 will turn out to be a big disappointment for them. But what do their base voters think. Do they think the teabaggers are poison to GOP hopes, or do they see them as heroes who will help the GOP in this election?

The Rasmussen Poll tried to find out. Their survey was done of 1,000 likely Republican voters on February 16th and 17th, and has a margin of error of about 3 points. And those results were not clear at all. In fact, if it does anything, it points out the division in the party -- with 38% saying the teabaggers would help the party and 32% saying they would hurt the party. Another 20% were unable to make up their minds, and only 10% said the teabaggers would have no impact at all on the election.

The current Republican Party is a party in search of redemption. Their numbers are the worst in a Congress with poor numbers. Can they become moderate enough to appeal to the mass of voters, or will they continue to let the teabaggers lead them down the path to electoral insignificance?

The next few months will answer that question, but I believe they aren't ready yet to take back their party from the teabaggers. Many party leaders may be ready for that, but the party's base is not. Too many in that base are under the delusion that they just weren't conservative enough in the last election -- and still haven't grasped the fact that most Americans see them as too extreme.

Corporate Donations Are Controlling Congress

It should come as no secret to anyone paying attention to what's going on in Congress that very little is being done to protect workers and consumers, while corporations and the financial interests on Wall Street seem to get everything they want. Why is this happening?

It's no secret (although many congresspeople probably wish it was). Those in Congress tend to pass laws that benefit their campaign donors and block laws that would regulate those donors. And the biggest campaign donors are Wall Street and the Corporations.

An especially effective way to create or block bills in Congress is to contribute to the committee heads, because those individuals have enormous power and can control what bills get reported out of their committee and what bills die in that committee. That's why many industries target their campaign giving to those committee chairmen (and sometimes the ranking member) of the committees in Congress that oversee the actions of their industry. By directing their money to those members of Congress, they can get more bang for their buck in controlling bills that affect their particular industry.

This represents a clear conflict of interest for industries to be donating to the very people appointed to oversee them, but sadly, it is legal. The folks at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has studied this campaign giving to committee chairs, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. The figures below show the amount of money given to committee chairs (Republicans) in the House of Representatives in the 2012 election by the industries their committee oversees, along with the percentage of their total donations those industry donations comprised. It also includes giving to ranking members (Democrats), which those industries made to cover themselves in case the House was flipped.

AGRICULTURE
Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma)..........$735,742 (47%)
Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota)..........$522,318 (51%)

ARMED SERVICES
Buck McKeon (R-California)..........$566,100 (30%)
Adam Smith (D-Washington)..........$201,000 (18%)

EDUCATION AND THE WORKPLACE
John Kline (R-Minnesota)..........$305,159 (14%)
George Miller (D-California)..........$220,192 (33%)

ENERGY AND COMMERCE
Fred Upton (R-Michigan)..........$1,873,723 (47%)
Henry Waxman (D-California)..........$667,050 (37%)

FINANCIAL SERVICES
Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas)..........$1,190,006 (41%)
Maxine Waters (D-California)..........$152,050 (24%)

HOMELAND SECURITY
Michael McCaul (R-Texas)..........$135,700 (12%)
Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi)..........$234,400 (21%)

JUDICIARY
Robert Goodlatte (R-Virginia)..........$88,793 (6%)
John Conyers (D-Michigan)..........$115,982 (12%)

NATURAL RESOURCES
Doc Hastings (R-Washington)..........$309,771 (23%)
Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts)..........$27,500 (3%)

SCIENCE, SPACE AND TECHNOLOGY
Lamar Smith (R-Texas)..........$120,150 (7%)
Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas)..........$80,449 (11%)

TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Bill Shuster (R-Pennsylvania)..........$502,016 (30%)
Nick J. Rahall II (D-West Virginia)..........$496,548 (37%)

Viewing these numbers, it becomes clear why industry is favored over workers and consumers. If these committee chairs (or ranking members) vote to regulate the industry they are overseeing, many of them stand to lose a substantial chunk of their campaign donations. That's a pretty big incentive to favor industry interests.

This brings up a valid question. Should committee chairs or ranking members (or even others on those committees) be allowed to accept campaign donations from the industries they oversee? I think not, because it is a conflict of interest. What do you think?

The Gender Gap Is Still Alive And Well

One of the things that hurt the Republican Party in the 2012 election was the huge gender gap in American politics. Women voters simply did not like the policies of the Republican Party, and showed that by voting for Democrats by a large margin. And that same gender gap still persists on many of the most important issues being debated today.

That is the conclusion of a recent NBC News / Wall Street Journal Poll (taken between December 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 adults, with a margin of error of 3.1 points). That poll shows women still exhibiting a much more progressive attitude toward issues than men. Women have a much more negative attitude toward the NRA, and many more of them want to see stricter laws on who can buy a gun (about 19 points more than men).

Women also give the president a 12 point better rating on his job performance than men do, and have a 9 point more positive attitude about Obamacare than men do. They also, by a 20 point margin over men, believe the GOP shutdown of government significantly hurt the economy.

But perhaps the most significant difference between men and women is in who they would prefer to control Congress -- because that could have a very big impact on the 2014 election. While a slight 52% majority of men (within the poll's margin of error) would prefer to see the Republicans control Congress, women have a much different view (with only 38% wanting GOP control). That's a 14 point difference between the genders.

This should be a significant concern to the Republican Party, because women vote in larger numbers than men -- and that 52% majority among men is not nearly large enough to offset their disadvantage among women. And there is evidence that they are worried -- since they are holding training sessions for their candidates on how to couch their issues during a campaign in a more female-friendly way.

I doubt that will work though. They are not willing to change or moderate any of their anti-woman policies, but only to couch those distasteful policies in a nicer way. They evidently think women are stupid, and will vote for anti-woman policies as long as those policies are expressed in a nicer way. But women are not as stupid as the GOP thinks. In my experience, women are at least as smart (and probably smarter) than most men when it comes to politics -- and treating them like second-class citizens who must be coddled and guided by men is not only a misguided, but very stupid policy.

Competence Of Obama Campaign

I have written before about how the polls were all over the place before the 2012 election. Some of them even had the election as a dead heat, or gave the advantage to Romney goinga into election day. But this difference being shown in the polls never seemed to bother the Obama campaign. They continued to be confident that they would win, and do it by a pretty good margin.

Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek recently wrote a good article in which he talked to the people running the Obama polling effort. They gave him the information their polls had in the weeks before the election. He used that information to make the chart above. That chart compares the Obama internal polls (the black line) with the Gallup Poll (the green line). Note that the Obama internal polls were very accurate in predicting the election, while Gallup pretty well embarrassed themselves with their prediction.

How could they be so different? The difference is in guessing who would actually go to the polls. Gallup, a few weeks before the election, went from using information from registered voters to using information from likely voters. In other words, they weighted their poll responses to favor those who they thought were most likely to vote. And since they thought the 2008 election was an outlier, and the actual electorate would look more like 2004 and previous elections. This means they undercounted minorities and young people, and possibly some other groups.

But the Obama campaign trusted what their people on the ground were telling them (and they had a very good connection to those GOTV people). So they didn't alter the numbers they were getting to make them look like previous elections. They accepted the fact that the 2012 election would look more like 2008 than any other election in the composition of the electorate -- and they were right. Their internal polling was very close to the final numbers.

Now this doesn't mean polls are useless. Some polls got very close to the real outcome (YouGov, Public Policy Polling, Pew Research, Ipsos/Reuters) and some didn't (Democracy Corps, Rasmussen, Gallup, AP/GfK, NPR). What it does mean is that polls get in some very dangerous territory when they try to predict who will vote and who won't (and alter their numbers accordingly). The Obama campaign internal polls were very accurate because that campaign had a great organization, and understood better just who was going to vote in the election.

I hope the polls like Gallup and Rasmussen have learned their lesson, and do a better job in the next election. But I guess we'll have to wait until 2014 to find out.

Gerrymandering

These pie charts show the effectiveness of gerrymandering. The Democrats got the most votes in the House races in 2012 (combined vote), but the Republicans maintained a firm grip on control of the House of Representatives. This happened because the Republicans were able to control many state legislatures back in 2010, and were able to redistrict by drawing district lines that were very favorable to them.

Race Is Still A Serious Issue For U.S. & GOP

Half a decade ago when President Obama was elected president of this country, there were many who said the United States was finally entering it's "post-racial" phase. We now know that was just wishful thinking. All the election of the first African-American president really did was to bring the racists back out from under the rocks where they were hiding, and give them the impetus to become a very vocal minority. It made it very clear that racist problems and attitudes are still very much alive in this country.

The Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College (in Clinton, New York) did a very interesting survey, which showed that racial attitudes (i.e., racial resentment) played a big part in the 2012 election (even bigger than in the 2008 election). The post-election part of the survey was done between November 7th and December 9th of 2012, and the results were released on May 21, 2013. They questioned 837 voters, and the poll had a margin of error of 3.4 points.

After studying the results of their survey, they have concluded that racial resentment played a big part in the last election. Before questioning the voters on how they voted, the respondents were first asked several questions -- questions which gauged their level of racial resentment (racism). The chart on top shows the results. Voters in the approximately one/third that had the least racial resentment voted overwhelmingly (nearly 100%), while voters with moderate racial resentment voted for Obama at a much lower level (slightly over 40%), and voters with the most racial resentment voted for the president at a very low level (slightly above 10%).

Now this doesn't mean that everyone who voted for Mitt Romney is a racist, but it does show that a large number of them are racist. Republicans are quick to deny that they are a racist party, and undoubtably there are many who are not racist in that party. But I submit that the racists have taken over the party in many states, and now compose the bulk of the party's base. That is why the party's policies are anti-minority and anti-immigrant -- and why immigration reform is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. When President Johnson passed the civil rights laws in the 1960's, it angered the racists in this country. They fled to the Republican Party in droves, and Republican leaders (especially in the South where the GOP was very weak) accepted these racist voters with open arms. I don't think the Republican leaders at that time meant for the party to become one that trumpeted racist values. I believe they thought they could use those millions of racist voters to seize power, and then put them in the background between elections.

But it didn't work out that way. The millions of new racist voters were numerous enough to take over the party in the South, and through the teabagger movement have also taken over the party in many other states. Now the party is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they disavow their anti-minority and anti-immigrant positions, they could lose a huge chunk of their base voters, probably to a third party. That third party wouldn't be big enough to gain much power, but it would be plenty big enough to devastate the Republican Party.

Frankly, I can't bring myself to feel sorry for the Republicans. As the old saying goes -- If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. They happily lay down with the racist dogs, and now they have been infested with the racist policies that come with that. And there is no easy cure for that infestation.

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The same survey also examined "birtherism" -- the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States (even though all evidence shows clearly that he was born in Hawaii). Sadly the survey showed that the belief in "birtherism" has not subsided. It is just as strong as it was before the president released the "long form" of his birth certificate years ago. The poll also showed (not surprisingly) that the same racial resentment that reared its ugly head in the 2012 election, is also a primary factor in whether a person is a birther. This is clearly shown in the chart below. Note that the more racial resentment a person has, the more likely it is that they will be a birther.

  

Voting Turnout For 2012 Election

(Image is from the ECHR Blog.)

The news media has been reporting that voting turnout in 2012 was down, and sort of giving the impression that it was very low. But while it was down from what it was in the 2008 and 2004 elections, it tied 1992 for the third best turnout since 1972 meaning only two elections in the last 40 years had a better turnout.

The turnout in 2008 was the largest in the last 40 years, coming in at 62%. That just barely beat out the 2004 election which had a turnout of 61%. The third place election years, 1992 and 2012, had a turnout of 59%. And rounding out the top five was 1984 with 57%. While I would like all of those years to have had a higher voter turnout, considering the turnout average over the last 11 elections (56.9%), it's not really that bad.

Some states had an excellent turnout, while the turnout for others was rather pitiful. According to a study by Nonprofit VOTE, there were two factors that contributed to a high turnout. States that were either a "swing state" or had same-day voter registration, performed much better than other states regarding turnout.

Here are the 10 states with the best turnout:
1. Minnesota...............76.1%
2. Wisconsin...............73.2%
3. Colorado...............71.1%
4. New Hampshire...............70.9%
5. Iowa...............70.2%
6. Maine...............69.2%
7. Virginia...............66.9%
8. Maryland...............66.8%
9. Massachusetts...............66.6%
10. Michigan...............65.3%

And here are the 10 states with the worst turnout:
1. Hawaii...............44.5%
2. West Virginia...............46.8%
3. Oklahoma...............49.6%
4. Texas...............50.1%
5. Arkansas...............51.0%
6. Tennessee...............52.6%
7. Arizona...............53.3%
8. New York...............53.6%
9. New Mexico...............54.9%
10. Kentucky...............55.9%

Being from Texas, I can only see one bright spot about my state's poor turnout. While the state did vote very red in the 2012 election, only half of all registered voters actually went to the polls. If the National Democratic Party sinks in the money and does the work it is saying it will do, it could be interesting if they can get more voters to the polls in the future (especially if they can register a bunch of new voters).

Gallup To Investigate Its Election Screw-up

Traditionally, the Gallup Poll has been one of the most reliable polls in this country. They having been at the polling game for a long time, and established a pretty good reputation for accuracy. But they blew it in the last presidential election, and because of that they have somewhat tarnished that stellar reputation. On the day before the election, their survey had Mitt Romney ahead of President Obama by 1 point. That was within the margin of error, but it still predicted the wrong man would win -- and it was the only major poll predicting a Romney win (even the Fox News Poll had the race as a dead heat).

Gallup now says they are going to investigate their polling methods, and make any adjustments necessary to improve their political polling. I think that's a smart move. But one clue to what went wrong can be seen in the chart above. It shows that Gallup was less than a point away from the actual result in their survey of registered voters. That had Obama winning by 3 points (and in the actual results, he won by 3.9 points).

But as elections draw nearer, a lot of polling organizations try to narrow down the registered voter numbers to a "likely voters" number to be more accurate. They use a series of questions to try and determine which of the registered voters they question are actually likely to vote. Unfortunately, when Gallup (and several other organizations) whittled their results down to likely voters they actually got further from the real vote, instead of closer.

The only major organization whose narrowing to likely voters got them closer to the actual outcome was the Pew Research Center (who narrowed it down from 7% in favor of Obama to 3% in favor of the president -- a very good result). Why did Pew's move to likely voters get them closer to the result, while the other organizations got further away? It seems that Pew included more people in their likely voter sample (keeping more of the registered voters in that sample), while the other organizations, including Gallup, was stricter in their likely voter guidelines (keeping less of the registered voters in their sample).

The result was that Gallup (and many others) underrepresented the people who actually voted -- and this was especially true of minorities and young people (both of which voted in larger numbers than many polls thought they would). Obviously, most of the polling organizations (with the exception of Pew) need to do a better job of predicting likely voters (the people who will actually vote).

I still think Gallup does a very good job in most of its polling (and I use their results often on this blog). But they screwed up in the 2012 presidential race by misidentifying likely voters. I hope they can correct this before 2014 (and especially before 2016).

It's Official - Obama Won BIG

It's been nearly two months since the 2012 election, but the final numbers are now in. And in a joint session, Congress certified the election returns yesterday. There are still those who say that the president barely won re-election in a very close election, but that is just not true. President Obama beat Willard Mitt Romney by about 5 million popular votes and 126 electoral votes -- and the president won the majority of states. That's a resounding victory, especially when most of the political pundits had considered him to be very vulnerable. Here's how Bloomberg News sums it up:

Barack Obama is the first president in more than five decades to win at least 51 percent of the national popular vote twice. . .

The president nationally won 65.9 million votes -- or 51.1 percent -- against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who took 60.9 million votes and 47.2 percent of the total cast, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Obama is the first president to achieve the 51 percent mark in two elections since Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did it in 1952 and 1956, and the first Democrat to do so sinceFranklin D. Roosevelt, who won four consecutive White House races. Roosevelt received 53.4 percent of the vote -- his lowest -- in his last race in 1944.

The president won the popular vote in 26 states and the District of Columbia, totaling 332 electoral votes, or 62 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. Romney won 24 states with 206 electoral votes.

Democratic House Vote Lead Has Grown

Americans know that the Democrats scored big victories in re-electing President Obama to another four years in the White House, and in increasing their majority in the Senate. What is less known is that Democrats also got more votes than Republicans in elections for the House of Representatives. Immediately after the election, it was reported that Democrats had gotten about half a million more votes than Republicans in House elections.

But now all the votes have been counted, and the Democratic lead has grown substantially. Democratic House candidates got 59,343,447 votes, while Republican candidates got 58,178,393 -- giving the House Democratic candidates an edge of 1,165,054 votes. That means Democrats got 50.5% of the total vote, and Republicans got 49.5%.

Looking at those percentages, one might think the House members would be pretty evenly divided between the two parties. But that is not the case. The Republicans have 234 House members, and the Democrats have 201 House members -- giving the Republicans 53.79% of House members, and the Democrats 46.21%.

This shows how valuable the Republican victory in 2010 was. They were able to gerrymander new House District lines in many states after the last census. This gave them the ability to hang on to a majority in the House, even though they didn't get as many votes as the Democrats did. It just proves that gerrymandering is a valuable tool when you can get away with it -- and it can allow a minority party to retain some power they probably shouldn't have.

Sour Grapes (GOP Style)

(Cartoon above is by Keith Knight at kchronicles.com.)

It was almost more than the right-wing (and racist) base of the Republican Party could stand, when the American people overwhelmingly elected an African-American to be president of the United States. They were convinced it had to be an anomaly, and the American people would come to their senses in 2012 and replace that scary black president with a rich white conservative man -- and then everything would be right with the world again.

But it didn't happen. President Obama again trounced a white right-wing opponent -- getting over 50% of the popular vote with more than a 3 million vote margin, and racking up an impressive 332 electoral votes. And many in the GOP just can't stand it. From the party's hierarchy to its dysfunctional base, Republicans have been searching for an excuse, any excuse, for the loss. Romney claims it was because the Democrats gave "gifts" to minorities, women, and young people (ignoring the massive "gifts" he had wanted to give the rich). The teabaggers think they just didn't nominate a candidate far enough to the right (even though Romney had moved so far to the right that he made Attila the Hun look like a bleeding-heart liberal).

Others just think there's no way they could have lost, especially considering their attempts to suppress the Democratic vote in numerous states. These people are convinced that President Obama must have stolen the election somehow. Think I'm kidding? Just look at these figures from a recent Public Policy Polling survey (taken between November 30th and December 2nd). These are all Republican responses:

DID THE DEMOCRATS ENGAGE IN VOTER FRAUD?
yes...............50%
no...............34%
not sure...............16%

DID OBAMA WIN LEGITIMATELY OR DID ACORN STEAL THE ELECTION FOR HIM?
won legitimately...............35%
ACORN stole it...............49%
not sure...............16%

Those are some pretty amazing numbers. Especially that 49% (virtually half of Republicans) think ACORN stole the election for the president. That's a pretty astounding accomplishment for ACORN -- especially considering the organization filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and has not even existed for the last two years. They might have known this if they had watched a real news organization, instead of just drinking the kool-aid served by Fox News.

But as crazy as that is, it doesn't even come close to the sour grapes craziness of those who want to secede from the United States over losing an election. Look at these numbers:

DO YOU SUPPORT OR OPPOSE SECESSION FROM THE UNITED STATES?
support...............25%
oppose...............56%
not sure...............19%

That's right. Fully one out of every four Republicans say they would support their state seceding from the United States -- and another 19% are not sure (meaning they might support it). Incredible!

The fact is that the American people turned out in large numbers on election day, and they rejected both the Republican candidate and the Republican policies. It's time for the sour grapes crowd to grow up and admit they were just beaten in a fair election.

Super-PAC's - A Gravy Train For Many

There is a lot of truth in this cartoon (by Steve Sack in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Ultra-rich guys like Sheldon Adelson poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Super-PAC's (with most of the money going to Romney and other Republicans) and they got nothing for their money -- except some embarrassment and a little smaller bank account.

But we can't say that nothing at all was accomplished by the super-PAC's, because they did pour a lot of money into the bank accounts of their founders and some political consultants. Some of those guys made out like bandits -- and I mean that literally. And even though the election has been over for about a month now, the super-PAC money is still flowing into a lot of pockets. It seems that there are very few rules about how the super-PAC's can spend their money.

In this election, there were 782 registered super-PAC's. Out of that number, a full 167 spent all of their money on "administrative" costs and had none left to spend on advertisements or mailings to help any candidate. Overall, the super-PAC's spent about $537.6 million, and about $88.6 million of that (nearly 16.5%) was spent on administrative costs (including six-figure salaries for founders, consultants, fundraisers, and others). Some examples are:

* Rebecca Burkett was the founder of the Newt Gingrich super-PAC called Winning Our Future. She paid herself about $480,000 -- with about half of that being paid after Gingrich was no longer a candidate. The last check she wrote to herself was just last week for $20,000.

* Gary Franchi established a super-PAC for Ron Paul called Revolution PAC. He raised about $1.2 million, and spent $1 million of that on administrative costs -- including salary for himself, rent for a facility that turned out to be a UPS mailbox, and payments to some of his own companies for various "services".

Some of the bigger super-PAC's like Karl Rove's American Crossroads paid a smaller percentage of their total funds for administrative costs -- but they raised so much more they still were able to pay consultants and fundraisers six-figure salaries.

In the final analysis, the rich contributors were sort of taken for a ride. They donated the money to get right-wingers elected, and only those in very safe districts survived. The rich got no political bang for their bucks -- but they did make a lot of PAC founders, consultants, fundraisers, and other political hangers-on a lot wealthier. I'll bet they will be a lot more careful when they consider super-PAC contributions in the future.

There was one place that none of the money went though -- none of the contributors got a refund.

Electoral Myths Of The Religious Right

We know now that Willard Mitt Romney was convinced that he would be the winner of the 2012 presidential election -- so convinced that he did not even consider writing a concession speech. Romney's misguided confidence was based on some seriously flawed internal polls. The fundamentalist christian right-wing was also convinced that Romney could not lose the election, but their belief was not based on polls. Instead , it was based on arguments they had constructed --arguments that we now know were just myths waiting to be busted by the voters.

The good folks over at Alternet, who have a penchant for making good lists, has composed a list of the 5 delusions of the religious right that had them convinced their GOP "warriors" would be victorious on election day. Here is their list:

Myth #1: Americans want a ‘True Conservative’
This is obviously untrue, since their conservative candidate lost both the popular and electoral vote. Of course, they are now saying that Romney just wasn't conservative enough -- and a "real" conservative would have won. That's just silly -- to think that voters preferred a moderately liberal Democrat because the Republican candidate wasn't conservative enough. If the voters had wanted a conservative, they would have voted for one.

Myth #2: Blacks will Defect from Obama over Gay Rights
Either the African-American voters believed in equal rights for everyone, or they thought there were more important issues than denying gays/lesbians equal rights. More than 90% of African-American votes went to the Democrats. If the right ever wants to make inroads into the African-American community, they need to abandon their message of hate. Having been the victims of bigotry for far too long, African-Americans can smell hate from a mile away -- and they don't like it.

Myth #3: Hispanics are ‘Natural Allies’ of the Religious Right
The idea here is that Hispanics are against women's rights (especially abortion rights) and equal rights for gays/lesbians. That is just not true. Hispanics have also been on the wrong end of bigoted hate, and the hate argument is as wasted on them as it is other minority groups. And Hispanic voters are not stupid. They know which party (and candidates) have supported and tried to help them, and which ones have not (and the GOP fails miserably here). Romney got only 27% of the Hispanic vote, even worse than the paltry 31% that McCain got in 2008.

Myth #4: Catholics Abandoning Obama for ‘Declaring War’ on the Church
This one was also just not true. While a few catholic leaders may have disliked the president, that was not the feeling of catholic voters in general. A majority of catholic voters voted for President Obama, just like they did in 2008. And this was in spite of the fact that one of the GOP candidates (Ryan) was a catholic.

Myth #5: Evangelical Wave Waiting in the Wings
Many on the religious right thought there was a huge wave of protestant evangelical voters just waiting to vote against the president. While evangelical voters did vote heavily for Romney, they did so in about the same numbers that had voted for McCain in 2008. And it wasn't nearly enough to counter the votes of liberal and moderate whites, minorities, young people, and the non-religious voters (who are growing much faster than any fundamentalist religious group).