Maybe the exit polls say differently, but last I saw:
Romney polled better at handling the economy than Obama.
The majority of those polled said the economy was the dominant issue.
A minority of those polled said they were better off now than four years ago.
And yet Romney still lost.
I’m actually trying to wrap my head around it, but I can’t. Apparently, the economy and economic well being is now an abstract construct with no tangible meaning to the majority of the electorate. I say this both based on observation and personal experience. If that is true, then what does this say about the future of the U.S.?
Clearly this is not, and was not, a binary proposition. There are always lots of factors electors consider when they vote (at least the swing voters), so elections will probably always defy an attempt to reduce them to a single variable. The Fox talking heads will always present you a simple worldview, but although it’s easier it ain’t true.
The one consistent I will say across polls is that Romney polled better than Obama at turning the economy around/creating jobs, that the economy was the dominant issue for most voters and that maybe around ~30 - 40% of the electorate thought they were better off than four years ago. I’m not sure how all of these mesh, but somehow it equated into an Obama win :mad:
Serious question. Has there ever been a candidate to lose an election while polling worse on the economy than his opponent?
Is this the first in a series, OMG ABC? if so, I’ll refrain until we get up to “Why do most minorities want to support a minority candidate?” or “What was so bad about Romney’s refusing to be specific about anything during the campaign?” where I may have some pointers for you.
I think the economy is not great. (although I am better off than four years ago, I consider myself lucky. I don’t think everyone is doing just fine). There is only so much a president can do to help the economy. Obama has been doing such things, as much as he is able to over the objections of some in Congress. Romney didn’t really have a plan. It is easy to state from a campaign stop “I will create 23.5 million jobs on day one,” but no one thought Romney would actually have a positive effect on the economy in the real world. (well, not literally “no one,” but not enough to help him).
The economy has been improving over the past three years. That’s simply a fact. Structuring an entire campaign around the myth that this isn’t true wasn’t very effective.
Maybe absent everything else in Washington DC, people *may *have felt Romney could handle the economy better (although, I’m not convinced that’s true). But people don’t vote that way. Maybe the thought of Romney with a Republican-controlled House and those Republican obstructionists in the Senate was just too much for many people to actually pull the lever for him.
In short, the Tea Party’s bullshit over the past four years may have poisoned it for any Republican nominee in 2012 by turning their party into the brand of assholes and obstructionists and scared white guys and anti-fact lunatics. People saw the harmful behavior wrought by the Republicans after 2010, and moved away from that toxic brand this time around.
So maybe they voted against the party more than anything.
Or people just realized that Obama has, in fact, turned things around and deserves four more years to keep digging us out of this remarkable ditch that the Republicans put us in. Ah- there it is again: that toxic brand.
You can parse the numbers various ways. For example, 66% of respondents said they are as good or better off today than they were 4 years ago. (33% said they were worse off. 25% said they were better off. 41% said no change.)
Also note that only 38% of voters think Obama is responsible for the financial mess. 53% lay it at Bush’s feet.
Also, Obama had a 53% favorable rating, compared with 47% for Romney. Romney was also judged more unfavorable than Obama 47% vs 50%. And, in terms of empathy, Obama connects with people more, with 53% of the respondents saying he’s more like them, while only 43% said Romney.
Apparently, you don’t really understand how most people view the economy and the expectations they have. I would opine that your understanding and perception seem to be seriously off-kilter, given that you characterize people’s differing opinion as meaning that, to them, the economy is merely an “abstract concept with no tangible meaning”.
I think your OP says less about the country and it’s future than it does about your perceptions and understanding of the world around you.
The question is: what are you going to do about it?
Also, studies have shown that the past year, rather than the past four years, is key to determining how voters feel about the economy.
The classic example is Reagan in 1984. 1981-82 were pure hell for millions of Americans. 1983 began what was, at the time, a pretty anemic recovery. Then finally it picked up some steam in 1984, and it was Morning In America.
And to a lesser extent this is true, on the plus side, of Bush in 2004 and Clinton in 1996. Flip it over, and the good economy that those of us who were around back then experienced under Carter in 1977-79 went down the tubes in 1980.
The polls were wrong. Or rather, the conclusions drawn from the polls were wrong. Asking about the economy or people’s perceptions of the candidates on specific issues may lead you to think you know which candidate will win, but until you do the actual experiment and have everyone in the country actually choose between them, you are subject to statistical and methodological error.
In research, computer simulation is often used to make guesses about what will happen under various conditions. Approximations are almost always used to simplify the calculation so you can actually do it on a computer in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes it’s accurate and sometimes it isn’t, you have to do the actual experiment to check. The polls are like that: little simplified approximations to an election. When the election contradicts them, it doesn’t mean something mysterious happened, it means the errors in your polling method led you to erroneous conclusions. It’s pointless to argue that your model really should have worked, reality is reality. Accept reality.
It’s possible that a significant number of people agreed with the ideas Romney claimed to espouse, but simply didn’t trust him to follow through because he tried too hard to be all things to all people.
Or maybe they just plain didn’t like him. I don’t think Romney’s stupid, nor particularly evil for a politician, but I wouldn’t buy a used car from him. Felt the same way about John Edwards: so many layers of rehearsed, shellacked phoniness it’s impossible to tell what’s at the core, if anything.
By a slim margin, though. Wasn’t it something like 50%-46% for Romney? The takeaways here would seem to be that Romney’s position on other issues hurt him a great deal and canceled out his minor advantage on the economy.
Yes. And while most of them feel the economy isn’t doing well, they also felt it’s getting better. Not coincidentally, that’s what the facts say is happening.
A lot of them don’t hold Obama fully responsible for that. They might not be happy with Obama’s handling of the economy and the state of the recovery, but they remember who was in office when the economy crashed and the chain of events that took place there. Republicans have basically tried to dismiss any recollection of George W. Bush as whining and un-leadership and more or less pretended he didn’t happen and didn’t even propose a substantially different set of economic policies, and the voters didn’t fall for it.
The economy is an important issue - I agree. The trouble is, I’m not convinced that Mitt would have done anything different than what Obama’s doing. Further, while the economy is not getting better at the rate I would like it to, it is getting better.
In the past four years the Republicans have shown more interest in pushing forward abortion bills and obstructing anything that Obama is for than they have on any economic issues. To put flatly, why should I believe that they would actually serve the country better economically speaking over the next four years?
The social issues are what kills the republican party for me. They have shown that they are no better than the dems on fiscal issues (indeed, their history indicates they are worse) in reality. Ideally speaking, they should actually be a fiscally conservative party, realistically speaking, they aren’t.
I agree. If they dropped the social conservatism and religious nutbaggery, and went back to traditional fiscal conservatism instead of just paying lip service to it, I might, just might, vote R every once in awhile.
