2012 Election Winners And Losers

Here is a quick rundown of who is up and who is down after the big night.

Winners

1.  President Obama is obviously the big winner getting the chance to lead for four more years.  After a rocky first debate performance he was able to recover.

2.  David Axelrod wins big for guiding the Obama administration to victory and he also gets to keep his beloved mustache.

3.  Senate Dems won big last night when earlier in the election cycle they appeared to be in danger of losing the Senate.

4.  House Republicans also were able to maintain their control.

5.  Paul Ryan is a big winner because he comes out of the campaign with increased stature and still has his day job in the House of Reps.

6.  Main stream polls win big because they were fairly accurate and republican insiders were not.

7.  Latinos flexed their voting muscles by helping deliver Florida and Colorado.

8.  Mitt Romney, yeah that’s right Mitt Romney, because I came away believing that he is actually a pretty good guy in spite of what the Obama campaign tried to portray him as.

 

Losers

1.  President Obama, some might ask how he can be able to be both a winner and a loser and the answer is simple.  He is a winner for getting a 2nd term, no one can deny him that now.  He is a loser because Washington looks the same (dems in the Senate and Repubs in the House) now as it did before the election and he is ultimately responsible for leading this still dysfunctional mess.  He is also a loser for the manner his campaign conducted itself.  There was no “hope and change” this time around.  Obama embraced a brutal (but effective) onslaught of negativity against Romney during the summer months that defined the republican for many voters.  But it also defined his campaign and is endanger of defining the president as a mean spirited, petty, small minded person who, oh by the way, happens to be the president.

2.  Mitt Romney obviously lost his bid to be president and one has to wonder if his window to be president has closed?

3.  Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michael Barone, Rush Limbaugh, Fred Barnes and any other republican who drank the party Kool Aid and thought all the other polls were wrong and Romney would win big.

4.  Joe Biden, the more exposed he is to the public the more the public wonders why he is Vice President?

5.  The MSM for failing to hold the Obama admin. to account for what happened in Benghazi.

6.  The Department of Defense is a big loser in an Obama 2nd term with the question being how bad will it get? 

7.  Last but not least the American people are the biggest losers for having to endure the status quo for four more years.  Because the sad reality of last night is that absolutely nothing has changed with all respective groups maintaining there previous positions prior to the elections.  The same group of so called leaders who accomplished nothing in the last few years are going to be back again.

 

 

The Day After The Election, A Conservative Assessment

For many conservatives who drank the party cool aid last night’s results came as quite a shock.  Many are waking up today asking what went wrong?  To give people my quick take on what happened last night let me share some quick points that I believe are worth thinking about in the coming days.

1.  The democrat’s get out the vote effort was superior.  In many states the dems banked enough early votes to withstand Romney’s election day surge.

2.  Republican claims of skewed polls with over sampling of democrats turned out to be wrong.  This is the main culprit for many conservative’s shock and dismay at the outcome last night.  All the republican elite making bold claims of a Romney victory based their assumptions on the idea that the major polls had oversampled democrats and that the reality of election day would mean less dems than predicted resulting in a major Romney victory.  In short, they were flat out wrong and embarrassed.  Not only did they embarrass themselves but their conservative followers feel let down, and rightly so.

3.  The entire Republican Party suffered a major black eye last night not because Romney lost but because they did such an effective job of selling the faithful on the idea that the polls were wrong that their credibility with these same people and the nation as a whole has been diminished.

4.  Fox News also is battered because they gave these pundits predicting a major Romney victory big air time.  Many will associate the pundits (even though they are just analysts) with the Fox News brand.  So just like in point #3 above its not just the people viewing Fox but also the nation as a whole thinks less of the network after the Romney victory narrative crumbled in the face of reality.

5.  Sandy seemed to blunt Romney’s momentum and help the president.  Before the storm I seem to recall that Romney was ahead in the RCP average on national polls and behind once it was over.  A case of bad luck for Romney and terrible destruction for the area hit by the storm.

6.  Before results started coming in last night at about 6pm the alarm bells inside my head were starting to go off after reading that the economy was the number one issue but that close to a majority of voters were still blaming Bush for the economy.

7.  I already talked about Fox News but let me now turn to the MSM.  There is no doubt that Romney did not get a fair shake from the press and Obama got a pass from most of them on Benghazi.  The fact that Obama was not held to account by the MSM for what happened there is an embarrassment.

8.  The conservative movement now has some hard questions to ask of its self like the obvious “why did we lose?”  Some of the exit polling has suggested that the so called “war on women” narrative employed by the Obama campaign was effective.  Also the latino vote seems to have played a large factor in Florida and Colorado.  Not to be forgotten is the issue of gay marriage that appears to have won approval on a state ballot for the first time ever.  These issues will have to scrutinized within the party to come up with a “winning” response the next time.

Divided U.S. Gives Obama More Time